AN: The next few chapters, due to the nature of the chapters, are going to be pretty group/other character focused chapters. We've got a lot ahead of us to explore. They're also going to be fairly "heavy" chapters, so hang in there and I'll try to fluff you up as soon as possible.
Please review if you feel so inclined. I do value your feedback as well as the support of knowing that you're still with me!
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The next morning, after breakfast, Sadie and Michonne held the gates open for two of the trucks to pass through. Tyreese, Carol, Maggie, Glenn, and Sasha were going on the much needed hospital run to prepare for the aftermath of the upcoming battle.
Sadie and Michonne had planned to do another round of Walker training with anyone that was interested and Rick and Daryl were working with anyone that wanted more target practice. Everyone was busy with something.
Carl had been told he was staying behind and had grudgingly taken babysitting duty, grumbling the entire time about his growing "nursery" and the fact that he could fight as good as, if not better, than a number of the individuals that were going. Rick had put his foot down, though. The battle ahead of them still wasn't very well organized and he didn't want Carl out there. No one was going to tell Rick that he was wrong. Carl was his child, and everyone knew that what they were going to attempt was going to be risky to them all.
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The hospital parking lot had afforded them very few Walkers as they spilled out of the trucks, but everyone knew that what a hospital looked like on the outside had very little to do with what it looked like on the inside.
They were all armed with both guns and handheld weapons, knowing that the guns were only a last resort. In a space like a hospital, firing a gun was somewhat akin to wringing the dinner bell and no one wanted to do that.
"OK," Glenn said, "we'll split up. I'll take Maggie and we'll go in one direction and the three of you go in the other. Try to stay together."
"Remember," Maggie added, "stay as close as you can to stairwells. They offer the best cover for a quick escape if they start to herd on you."
Carol had given everyone a list of things that they needed and everyone carried a large sack over their backs with the command to get as much as possible.
"We'll meet back here at the trucks. Try to be quick about it, get in and out as soon as you can," Glenn said.
Everyone nodded their understanding and started toward the entrance to the hospital.
Inside the lobby there were all of four Walkers, a low number for a hospital and everyone started to feel a little better for a moment, taking those four out. Without speaking, Tyreese signaled that he was taking his group in one direction and Glenn and Maggie nodded, starting off in the other. Silence was going to be key to this operation.
Tyreese hadn't originally planned to go on this run. He didn't feel like he was the greatest on runs. He wasn't the quickest member of the group, so he'd often let the others go, but seeing Carol and Sasha both loading into the vans this morning had driven him to the spur of the moment decision to join them.
Now they were trotting down the hall, looking for some kind of supply closet to duck into and fill their sacks, as quickly as possible. So far, the Walker population seemed low, a few here, a few there, but nothing that they couldn't handle, especially not with the three of them. Tyreese hoped Glenn and Maggie were fairing as well as they were so far.
They hadn't found what they were looking for, and they were venturing farther down the hallway than Carol had hoped they would need to go. She'd hoped they'd find a supply room of sorts not too far from the lobby. Each door that they passed, each one they peered into or opened, held the threat of another Walker, or worse, several. In hallways like these it was easy to get trapped, and all three of them were on guard to avoid that happening. They slipped past a few doors that looked like offices of some type and continued looking.
Sasha turned to Carol, who was right behind her, Tyreese a few feet behind them and she pointed upward. Carol understood that she was suggesting they try the second floor. Maybe Glenn and Maggie had scored a first floor storage facility and they could find more on the second. Carol turned her attention to looking for a staircase. She turned, briefly and signaled toward the ceiling to let Tyreese know they were planning on going upstairs as soon as possible.
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Sadie came to check on the baby, peeling off the extra layer of clothes she was wearing that was drenched in Walker mess. Despite the warm weather, she was going through quite a few long sleeved shirts during the Walker training. It wasn't so much the killing them that was disgusting and made her want to cover herself and change often, as it was the efforts at getting the Walkers hobbled.
As she approached, she noticed Carl sulking, sitting in his chair with his arms crossed and a clearly bitter expression on his face.
He was sitting in the sun instead of under the umbrella that had been brought for him. The girls played in their pen under a tent that Carol had set up for them, and the baby was napping in a seat.
"Has he been good?" Sadie asked, approaching the bitter young man.
Carl shrugged, "Fine," he said.
"What's wrong?" Sadie asked, walking over to Carl and sitting on the ground next to him so that she could see his lips. "You look angry."
Carl looked like he wasn't going to answer her at first, but seeing that she had no intention of leaving him alone, he finally decided to respond.
"I wanted to go fight," Carl said. "If we're going to take out this group that could threaten me, could threaten all of us, I want to fight. I'm sick of being treated like a kid! I'm not a kid anymore and I've more than proven that! Everyone else is going out there, but I'm supposed to stay here and help with the babies. It's not fair. I could help out there."
Sadie regarded him. She'd gotten most of what he said, enough to know why he was upset. She was good at reading people, but she didn't need to be good at it to see that Carl was frustrated, and this frustration wasn't anything new. She'd seen the conflict earlier, briefly, but hadn't known entirely what was going on between Carl and Rick.
One thing she'd already learned was that Rick was good at giving orders, but he wasn't always clear as to why you should follow those orders. If he said it, it was a type of decree. Something to be obeyed but not questioned. Sadie had seen that in a few interactions with Rick. She imagined he was no less demanding with his son.
"You are not a child," she said after a few minutes, "you are a man, right?"
Carl looked at her.
"I don't know," he said, "but I'm not a kid."
Sadie nodded.
"Sometimes, when we grow up, we have to do things that we don't want to do, especially now. Sometimes we have to fight when we don't want to fight, and sometimes we have to stay back when we don't want to stay back," Sadie said, struggling to think ahead in her argument even as she spoke.
"It doesn't make sense for me to stay back," Carl said. "I get why Mark is staying back, why Carol is staying back, why Michonne is staying back. I don't think that I need to be staying back, though. The only reason dad doesn't want me going out there is because he thinks I'm still a kid. He thinks I can't do it."
Sadie shook her head at Carl.
"That's not the reason," Sadie said. "Are you good at making decisions?"
Carl nodded. "I think so," he said.
Sadie nodded.
"Do you think that you could be a leader? A good leader?" She asked.
Carl nodded.
"Your dad wants you here, to be a leader," Sadie said.
Carl looked frustrated. "Leaders don't stay behind, Sadie, that's why you call them leaders," he protested.
Sadie smiled.
"No, they don't, but future leaders do. They have to be behind the leaders, so that when the leaders step down, they can step up. Your dad is leaving you here as a future leader. If something happens, and none of us come back, you would have to be the leader. You would keep things going here. That's a very big job, bigger than going with us," Sadie said.
Carl considered it a moment.
"But you're all coming back," Carl said. He couldn't imagine, and didn't want to imagine, that they could all walk out those gates to go to battle and no one return.
"We hope we're coming back, but we might not," Sadie said. "Your father wants to be prepared in case the worst happens. Could you be that leader if we don't come back?"
Carl thought about it and Sadie watched his face change as he tried to wrap his mind around the concept.
"I wouldn't want to," Carl said, "but I could."
Sadie smiled at him.
"That's why you're staying here. You're the right man for the job if something happens," she said. Sadie got up and collected the baby out of his seat, taking a moment to gently touch each of the girls that had developed a sudden interest in her. She took the baby toward headquarters to feed him, hoping that Carl wouldn't look so bitter through the upcoming days.
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Just as they had found the stairwell, Carol and Sasha became immediately aware that they had company. Spilling out from some of the rooms were more than a few Walkers, more than the few that they'd seen so far, at least. They were between the two women and Tyreese.
"I can handle them," Tyreese called, "you two go ahead."
He'd drawn the attention then of the Walkers. Carol wanted to help him, but she felt Sasha grab her by the arm and yank her into the stairwell, closing it quickly.
"There weren't that many," Sasha whispered. "He can take care of them, if we can get some supplies we can be back down in a hurry. We need to get out of here as soon as possible."
Carol was worried about Tyreese. She was sure that he could handle the number of Walkers that had spilled out, and getting herself or Sasha crowded up in the middle of them wasn't going to make it any easier on him, but she hated just leaving him down there and not knowing what was happening.
She followed Sasha up the pitch black staircase, feeling out the stairs with her feet as she went, Sasha's cool hand clutching her on the arm. When they came out on the second floor, Sasha opened the door, a little light flooding in, and peered out in the hall.
"Coast looks clear," she whispered. They left the shelter of the stairwell and started on their trek in search of supplies. For a moment, Carol wished she had paid more attention to the little things in life, like where supply rooms were located in hospitals, but that was information that she never thought she'd have to know.
Finally the two women stumbled upon a supply room, only a few Walkers coming having sauntered into their way. They opened the door, elated to finally locate something worthwhile. A solitary Walker lurked in the room and Sasha immediately took it out. She closed the door behind them, leaving them in the dark, but more protected from outside Walkers that might smell them.
They went to work packing their bags with any and everything they could get their hands on. It was too dark in the room to tell what most of what they were grabbing was, and neither had thought ahead to bring a flashlight. It didn't matter, though, what mattered was cramming the bags as full of anything and everything as was possible and getting back to the others quickly.
When their bags were stuffed, they zipped them up and both women shouldered the heavy packs. Sasha opened the door and peered out, cursing to herself about the dimness of the hallway.
"Looks clear," she whispered, opening the door wider and pushing Carol out in front of her. Carol reached her hand back and took Sasha's, hoping she remembered correctly the way back to the stairwell. They'd wandered farther from it than they'd hoped to wander, but at least they had two bulging bags worth of supplies that could very well come in handy in the following days.
Carol felt like it was growing darker in the hallway, and she hoped that time hadn't slipped away from them and that it wasn't growing too dark outside. She couldn't imagine it was, but time had a way of slipping up on you when you were focused on things.
Carol heard growling. She swallowed hard, trying to make out any movement or shapes in front of her. She couldn't see anything. She turned to look behind them and could see that Sasha, having dropped her hand, was already on guard against a handful of approaching Walkers. Carol palmed her knife and ran at them.
The growling got louder, and turning the corner that was now behind her, Carol saw more Walkers coming. There were a few spilling out of surrounding rooms. They were so close to the staircase, so close to refuge, but the number of Walkers spilling into the tight, dimly lit hallway was threatening to cut them off from escape entirely.
Carol felt the Walkers around her, as she worked to stab at them. She cringed when she felt their fingers grasping at her. Sasha was fighting as hard as she could against those coming from the other direction, and Carol hoped they'd be able to clear the hallway enough to dart into the stairwell. She hoped Tyreese would be waiting downstairs.
Carol heard Sasha cry out and she stabbed the Walker that was directly approaching her before turning and stabbing one that was attacking the girl.
"No! No!" Carol cried out. She tried to stab a few more, but their cries were drawing others.
Sasha was crying, and understandably so. She threw her bag toward Carol, falling backwards.
Carol reached and grabbed her by the arm, trying to pull her back up.
"I'm bit, Carol," Sasha pleaded. "Take the stuff, go!"
Carol pulled at her, realizing that she was sobbing too.
"No," Carol said. "We'll take you back, we'll figure something out," she pleaded.
"Carol, there's nothing to do. Take the bag, go!" Sasha pleaded.
Carol killed another Walker that was nearing Sasha, seeing several slowly making their way down the hallway toward them.
"Go now!" Sasha commanded. "Before they get here! Go! I've got my gun, I'll be fine, but I won't do it until you go," she pleaded, looking at the slowly approaching Walkers. "Please go, leave me enough time," Sasha sobbed.
Carol grabbed the bag, sucked in her breath and killed a Walker that was between her and the stairwell. Once inside, she slumped against the door, sucking in air and trying to process what had just happened. She heard the gunshot, and she knew she had to go, even though she wanted to stay there a little longer, resting against the door. Everyone else would have heard the shot too, though, it may even have stirred up Walkers elsewhere in the hospital, and she needed to try to get out with the sacks. She had no idea, though, how she was going to tell them, how she was going to tell Tyreese, what had happened to Sasha.
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Glenn and Maggie were the first to be ready to leave, their bags bulging. The run hadn't been difficult for them, and they were surprised. Their first attempt to raid a hospital had been a harrowing event where they only barely escaped, and had left behind everything they'd picked up in order to move faster.
They'd maybe encountered 30 Walkers total since they'd entered the hospital, the four in the lobby excluded, and their bags were brimming. They'd found a supply closet as well as two really well stocked offices and they'd left next to nothing behind. Both of them were weighted down and heading back down the hallways they'd travelled earlier, stepping over the Walkers that they'd put down. The hallways weren't filling with Walkers around them, so they thought they might even have the luck of making the return trip to the entrance without any encounters.
Then they heard the muffled sound of gunfire, though they couldn't pinpoint where it had come from.
"That had to be the others," Maggie whispered.
Glenn didn't say anything. He didn't know what to say. A gunshot meant someone was in trouble, someone was in big trouble. You wouldn't dare to fire a shot unless you were desperate for the fact that it could draw every Walker on that floor to you. Whoever it had been, though, had only fired once, and to Glenn that wasn't a promising number of shots. If you were going to shoot Walkers, you had to be committed to it. In these conditions you'd have to keep firing until you reached some kind of safety. One shot, he thought with a shiver, might not have been meant for Walkers.
Maggie wanted to go and help them, to find out what had happened and who had fired the shot. Why they had fired the shot. As they neared the lobby, however, she felt Glenn grab her wrist and tug her toward the doors. There were a few Walkers ambling about in the lobby again and Glenn forged ahead, slamming the hatchet he was carrying into their heads as they approached.
"We gotta go help them!" Maggie said a little louder than she wanted to.
"We can't help them, Maggie. Wherever they fired that shot is bound to be overrun with Walkers. Look around you, the halls are starting to fill up now. We have to get out of here," Glenn said, fighting back the cracking in his own voice.
"We can't just leave them," Maggie hissed.
"We're not going to leave them. We'll go back to the vans and we'll wait, just like we agreed," Glenn said. "We'll wait for them to come."
"What if they don't come?" Maggie asked.
Glenn didn't respond, he just continued to drag her with him, almost to the doors that would grant them access to the outside.
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Carol burst through the door into the first floor. It seemed brightly lit in comparison to the black stairwell. She'd had to drag her feet, carefully, feeling for every step, not wanting to fall and break something, further weighed down by the two heavy packs she carried.
She was exhausted, overwhelmed with emotion, and worried that she didn't have the strength to fight the half dozen Walkers waiting for her in the hallway. She stabbed them, though, one by one as they approached her, panting. She came to the point where a mass of them blocked the floor and her stomach wrenched a little. She carefully stepped over the piled, letting her eyes search it for a moment.
Tyreese wasn't there. He had escaped them at least. He hadn't come for her and Sasha, and she hoped that he had gotten out already.
She continued on, knowing the lobby wasn't far ahead, and then the outside, and the vans. She'd wait there and try to figure out how to tell them Sasha wasn't coming, that the shot they'd heard had been her final moment. She felt overcome for a second and gasped in air, determined now to make it out.
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Glenn and Maggie didn't know how long they'd been waiting in the parking lot, standing by the trucks since the Walker threat was minimal at the moment. They hadn't seen more than they could take care of without barely getting winded.
When Tyreese finally appeared from the side of the building, walking almost leisurely toward them, they were both relieved for a moment. He looked unharmed, even flashing them a smile before driving his hammer into the skull of an approaching Walker and continuing on as though nothing had happened.
"He's alone," Maggie said.
"Maybe Carol and Sasha are just behind him," Glenn said, trying to sound optimistic. "Maybe they got split up."
As Tyreese approached he called out to them.
"Got separated, blocked in for a bit, took an emergency exit. Wasn't anybody there to stop me, and it was an emergency to me," he said. He was smiling. "Glad y'all waited on me."
Tyreese approached and went around to load his bag in the truck, still talking, apparently not noticing the worried faces of Glenn and Maggie.
"Don't know how useful what I got was, but I didn't see too much that we could use. I picked up a bag full of whatever I could find, though, raided a few rooms. Maybe there's something there. Everything helps, right?" He said. He walked around to the front of the van where Maggie and Glenn stood.
"Did y'all get into a tight spot?" He asked. "I heard the shot."
"Wasn't us," Glenn said, swallowing.
Tyreese shaded his hand and studied both trucks. He'd assumed that Carol and Sasha were in one of them, waiting.
"Where are Carol and Sasha?" Tyreese asked, his face dropping a little.
"Don't know," Maggie said softly.
Tyreese turned for a moment, like he was going to start back toward the hospital.
"You don't know where they are," Glenn said, "and the Walkers got stirred up by the shot, there's no need to go back in there."
Glenn knew that Tyreese desperately wanted to go back in there, and he fully understood. It was Carol and Sasha. Even Glenn wanted to go back in there and he didn't have the relationship with either of them that Tyreese did.
"I gotta go back in there," Tyreese said. He started walking in a determined fashion across the parking lot and toward the hospital.
"We gotta stop him," Maggie said.
"We can't stop him," Glenn said. "If it were you in there, I'd go back. If we tried to stop him now he's liable to lose it with us and try to fight us."
"Should we help him?" Maggie asked. She really didn't know what to do in this situation. Part of her knew that it was likely a suicide mission to go back in now, but as she watched Tyreese making his way toward the entrance she felt like they shouldn't just hang back and let him go alone.
Before Tyreese got to the entrance, Carol pushed the door open and nearly spilled out into the parking lot, dropping one of the bags in the process. Tyreese jogged over to her, grabbing her up and pulling her to him, one arm around her waist and the other on the back of her head, burying her face in his chest for a second.
"Oh my God," he said, "I was starting to think something had happened in there," he said. He paused after a second and released her. "Where's Sasha?" He asked.
Carol could see the look of terror already rising in Tyreese's face. She felt herself being overcome with emotion again and she wasn't sure what to say, or what to do. She could immediately tell that her own face told him all that he needed to know. He looked like he was fighting back tears already.
"I'm sorry," Carol said. "I'm so sorry." She broke down then, wrapping her arms around him, wanting to comfort him. For a moment she wished that the tables had been turned and that it had been her that had been overrun in the hallway, though she almost had been.
They both stood there for a moment, clutching at each other, both sobbing quietly.
Maggie and Glenn could tell what had happened, though they didn't know the details. Just watching Tyreese and Carol across the parking lot, Sasha not in sight, made it very obvious what had happened. Maggie started to cry quietly and Glenn reached his arm over, pulling her to him.
Finally, getting himself together, Tyreese reached down and shouldered the bag that Carol had dropped. He wrapped his arm around her waist and silently led her toward the truck that they would be taking, neither of them addressing Maggie or Glenn in any way.
Maggie and Glenn took the cue and got in their truck. Glenn cranked the engine and waited until he could see that Carol and Tyreese were both in their truck before heading back to the community.
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Michonne and Beth had prepared dinner together, realizing that Carol would be getting back too late to make it. Sadie had relieved Carl of babysitting and was trying to entertain the girls while keeping an eye on their newest addition who still spent most of his time sleeping.
Michonne and Beth had also decided to serve dinner, quietly, when the group got back and they realized that Carol wasn't emotionally ready to assist them.
Over dinner she had recounted, to some degree what had happened in the hospital, having to pause a few times to collect herself. Tyreese sat beside her, silent, occasionally putting his hand on her shoulder. He looked emotionally exhausted, but hadn't said anything to anyone. He was trying to keep his composure. That much was evident to Michonne.
The group had agreed to have a moment of silence for Sasha, but the moment had spread out into the vast majority of the meal. No one wanted to speak. The loss of Sasha hung heavy on several of the members, and for those who didn't feel it quite as sharply, it still served as a reminder that no one was promised anything, and the reminder wasn't uplifting in consideration of what they had in store for them.
No one had much interest in talking, everyone was brooding, thinking about something, whether it was someone they lost, someone they had left to lose, or even their own mortality.
As they had left headquarters, Mark and Michonne agreeing to stay behind and take night watch so that Josh and Brenda could start preparing themselves physically to be ready for the upcoming battle which would require them not to be nocturnal, each person had passed by Tyreese and offered him some sort of condolence, either in the manner of speaking of a sibling that they too had lost, and offering him the comfort they could, or just in acknowledging his feelings and telling him that they were there, should he wish to seek them out and talk about it.
Sadie was going to be spending the next few nights at Michonne's house, agreeing to look out for all the babies and confessing that she needed Daryl's help to wake her when and if any of them started crying. She was one of the last to leave, hugging Carol first and then Tyreese.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know it's hard. If you want to talk about it, I'm a good listener."
Tyreese offered her a half smile and squeezed her shoulder.
"Daryl and I will take the babies," she said to Carol. "You don't need to worry about Judith."
Carol thanked her and started as though she were going to gather up dishes.
"I've got it," Michonne said. "Go get some rest. You both look ready to collapse. Mark can watch while I wash, we've got enough time."
Carol thanked Michonne and hugged her for a moment. Michonne returned the embrace and held it until Carol pulled away. She'd already offered her condolences to Tyreese, but she turned to him again as Carol started toward the door.
"I'm really sorry about Sasha," Michonne said, feeling tears welling up in her eyes. "She was a good person, and we're all going to miss her."
Tyreese nodded, not saying anything and squeezed Michonne's shoulder. He passed by her and started toward the door behind Carol. Michonne could hear Daryl speaking to him in the other room as she gathered up the dishes to take to wash them.
When she passed into the other room carrying the stack of dishes, Daryl was leaning against the arm of the sofa. He took the stack from her and followed her out to the tub where she was going to wash them.
"I hate you gon' be doin' night watch," Daryl said. "I wish I could stay with you."
"You need to rest," Michonne said. "I'll be fine with Mark. You've got to help Sadie with the babies. Remember, you've got to wake up any time you hear one of them, I won't be there to get up, Tyreese and Carol are not in any condition to handle it, and Sadie can't hear them."
"I know," Daryl said. "I told her we'd make her some kinda bed or somethin' but she's insistin' she's gon' be fine sleepin' on the floor on a pallet. Said she wanted to stay in our room so I wouldn't have ta go all the way downstairs to wake her."
"That'll work for tonight, Daryl. I'll talk to her tomorrow. Go get some sleep," Michonne said.
Daryl pulled her to him for a minute.
"I'm gon' miss you, 'Chonne, I don't like tryin' ta sleep without'cha," he said.
Michonne could tell that Daryl was affected by the loss of Sasha, probably reminded of losing his own brother. She squeezed him.
"I'm going to miss you too, Daryl, but I'll see you in the morning. You just go to sleep and dream about me and it'll be the same thing," she said.
Daryl reached his hand under her chin, tilting her face toward him. He kissed her and held it for a minute.
"Won't be the same, 'Chonne, but I'll try ta sleep," he said.
"I love you," Michonne responded.
"I love you too, 'Chonne, I reckon I'll see you in the mornin'," Daryl said.
"Goodnight, Daryl," Michonne said, watching him make his way toward their house.
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AN: That was a hard chapter to write, and I know that there will always be hard chapters. This is, after all, The Walking Dead. I hope no one is too terribly distraught. I need some chocolate now…