Killer Within
Madeline is in such a panic that she imagined the walls around her constricting and tightening around her while Maggie, Lori and Carl scrambled through the narrow halls, sprinting desperately away from the approaching swarm. They were so focused on putting distance away from the undead chasing them from behind that they were nearly blindsided by the Walker that appeared from an adjoining hallway.
"Lori, watch out!" Maggie screamed, swinging her knife at a shambling Walker that was mere inches from the pregnant woman's throat. The Walkers' jaw is yacked clean off and Madeline forces it down by kicking in its one good; stomping its fleshy, grotesque face in with a quick curb stomp into the hole in its jaw for good measure while it was down. Bone crunched and grinded under her boots, she scuffled on her side to defend the group as they headed deeper and deeper into the belly of the prison. The uncharted, shadowy territory terrified Madeline even more now that the moans and dead groans she heard haunting the walls weren't just her mind playing tricks anymore. Something sinister lurked in every lingering, creeping shadow that would greedily rip out her throat and they needed to find a way out fast before they ran into any locked doors or dead ends.
"We should head for the boiler room, that's the only place that I think we can lock them out!" The sharp-witted Maggie whispered, looking back at Madeline with an intense amount of worry burning in her pale green eyes as they darted around every crevasse in the walls and flinched at every skitter on the floor. Madeline nodded briefly, but as she began to let the group advance she could hear the animalistic snarls echoing closer and closer from behind them. The group hurried into the open boiler room and huddled back, each moving in turn to move the heavy, metal door shut while it screamed against the floor in shrill protest.
"Oh!" Lori suddenly winced sharply, breathing hard and ragged as pain forced her to clutch her lower belly. The other two women were trying their best to keep the door behind them from slamming wide open when the hoard began to haunch and saunter against it from the other side, morbidly attracted to the noise it had made before they could see its promise of living prey. The door needed to be pushed a few more inches, but the force of the undead shoving their weight against the door hindered them significantly, and they resorted to breaking off the prying, boney fingers of the corpses that so eagerly snapped and reached for their faces so that they could shut it.
When the pressure in her arms and inside her center became too much, Lori staggered away and was using a chain attached to the metal machine they were hiding against to keep her body upright as the pain burned through her core in an inferno of raw, white-hot nerves. Maggie and Madeline's eyes went wide with fear as Carl mutedly tried to soothe his agonized mother from their distance, begging her to tell him what was wrong.
The lock clicked and the woman pushed themselves away from the door, breathing heavily as the wild scratches the undead made against it echoed deviously in the room, the undead bitterly scolding their cheated luck out of fresh meat.
"Maggie!" Carl yelped sadly, looking pleadingly at the other woman as tears were streaming down his pale, freckled cheeks. His mother was gingerly wiping them away with her bloodied hands as she struggled to breathe from the searing pain that scorched her body like fire as her round belly lurched and jerked; blood beginning to seep from in between her legs.
"Oh God…" Madeline breathed numbly, frozen in place by the door as bile churned wickedly in her gut. Maggie gravely went to Lori's side, kneeling beside her now laid-down, swollen form. Madeline forced herself to drown out their dark conversation; she didn't think she would be able to keep on a brave face for Carl if she heard Lori say the only way for the baby to live would be for her to die. Madeline could see the heartbreak in both mother and child's eyes as they began to say their goodbyes while Maggie took out her knife and ushered the young boy over to her.
"You are so brave, Carl…" She heard Lori whisper to her son dismally as he began to move away from her side, saying it as if it were to reassure her that no matter what, Carl would survive when she was gone. Lori's eyes squeezed shut into fine lines as Maggie lifted her shirt to prepare for the C-Section, eerily calm about the rapidly closing window of life that she had left. Carl was weeping distraughtly within Madeline's limp arms, staring directly at his mother's face, contorted in the anguish of knowing that this would be one of the last grisly images her son would remember of her.
Without warning Maggie's knife mercilessly pierced Lori's flesh and as the horrible scream reverberated through the boiler room, Madeline had to force Carl to turn around so he wouldn't have seen his mother being split open like a demented lab specimen. Trembles of disgust and horror bristled against Madeline's white flesh, growing all the more uncontrollable as she pressed Carl to her tighter so he couldn't look back at the unspeakable act Maggie was forced into doing to his mother. He sobbed violently against Madeline's chest, clutching her chunks of her shirt into his fists while her arms shielded his ears from the worst of Lori's hoarse, dying howls.
"I'm sorry, Carl, I'm so fucking sorry…" She whispered bitterly, wrapping her arms around his thin, scrawny shoulders, adamantly grinding her teeth to drown of the sickening tearing and ripping of flesh that used to be Lori's womb. She could hear Maggie's rising hysteria in her harsh, gagging pants as she dug her blade deeper into Lori's stomach, every inch she dug deeper seeming to increase her desperation after Lori was good and done for, dead to the world with her body desecrated by the large hole in her guts. Suddenly the sickening sounds stopped altogether; Madeline heard Maggie gasp, and a tiny, ringing cry shut out the world.
"It's not real…" Madeline's mind argued as she numbly placed one foot in front of the other, leading the funeral march from the abysmal darkness of the catacombs and back into the blinding outside world. "It just can't be real…" She carefully adjusted the tiny bundle in her arms, hushing the worst of the baby's waning cries by rocking her gently against her chest. Her squinted eyes found Beth and Hershel first out in the courtyard, unharmed and seemingly grateful to have escaped with what could loosely be called their lives. At least they weren't going to be added to the list of people she had abandoned to their deaths. Faces flashed through her mind as she made every difficult, mind-numbing step forward; the faces of Gerard, Ollie, Rose, Gwen, T-Dog, Carol and now Lori?! "Dear God, don't make me do this…" The incessant guilt throbbing in her heart stung so much when Rick quickly hurried to make his way over to their group from the far side of the yard, his eyes searching wildly at their faces to do a head count on who was missing that he hadn't even noticed the baby in her arms.
"Where is she?" He asked simply, incomprehensively wrapped in his denial that he was actually perplexed by Lori's absence. Madeline's heart broke; she couldn't hold it in anymore and her pitiful tears streaked down her face as she slowly shook her head to confirm the sheriff's worst fears. Rick's inconsolable sadness blindsided him, the weight of her revelation was too much for him to process that he collapsed, moaning sorrowfully at the loss of his wife. Madeline felt a burning sensation in her chest cavity, like she was being hollowed out on the inside while she watched Rick scream and curse on the cement floor. She couldn't react anymore, not now, something had happened in her heart and she felt like that last string of humanity she had so stubbornly held onto was gone in an instant.
"I need to get over this," she thought stoically, flinching at the memory of the loud crack that the bullet Carl had unleashed into his mom's brain made, frowning absent mindedly as she gently hushed the infant that was fussing in its blood-soaked blanket. "I can't feel anything."
"We're going to need more formula soon to take care of that baby." Hershel stated sullenly, his glum demeanor brightening in his eyes as he watched the baby's tiny, pudgy arms waving gently at his silver whiskers. Only hours after securing cell block C, the remnants of the group were able to scurry back into their cells and thank their "lucky" stars for being able to survive the evening's aftermath. Madeline had been with Hershel to examine Lori Junior since then, but she wasn't in any tremendous rush to leave; to grimly find out just how many of her new friends had become Walker Bait that day. They would bury the dead tomorrow, right now they were, in every sense of the term, recovering.
"You're telling me," Madeline chuckled in melancholy, cooing lightly and clicking her tongue affectionately at the newborn nestled in her arms, "we have enough to last the week, but then what do we do?" She asked in response, brushing away long auburn locks of her hair that had found their way into the baby's tiny face. The infant was a welcome distraction to being alone, after the way everyone had been afflicted by the dangers of being overrun by Walkers, being constantly on her feet to attend to the nameless baby girl kept her spirit from faltering like everyone else's.
"We'll need to make another run for supplies into town, but with Rick in his current condition, it would be unwise to consult on him right now." The white man informed, a shuddering grimace tightening his wrinkled features as Rick's screams echoed through the silent halls of the prison. Madeline nodded in agreement as her own shivers unnerved her as well. If she had been feeling low after the attack, Rick was sent straight to hell with grief. Madeline could envision Rick stalking the shadowy bowels of the catacombs with his large, blood-soaked machete, wildly slaughtering and dismembering in drunken, grief-stricken bloodlust. She'd never felt so threatened by the man before, but now that she had this baby in her arms, she wasn't too sure of where to take the next, timid steps with her new, broken leader.
The baby girl began to fuss and whine as she began to awaken and Madeline excused herself from Hershel's cell, soothingly rubbing the tiny bundle's back as she made her way to her cell to put her to lay down. Madeline hummed a tuneless lullaby to comfort the child as she made her way up the iron stairs, keeping her gaze low and over her shoulder to check on the baby's shallow, calming breaths.
The discolored infant whined and wriggled helplessly when Madeline had gently laid her down into a postal service crate with one pink blanket to serve as a mattress and her bundle as the blanket. She was soon curled into a mini ball and was fast asleep in her makeshift cradle beside Madeline's metal bedframe. The ghost of a smile came to Madeline's lips, but as she moved away from the precious crate, and the baby had drifted off to sleep, the concrete beneath her shifted and toppled the woman over. Madeline was lucky to have fallen into her bed, but the force of her fall made her slam the edge of her skull onto the bedframe. Her head jarring, Madeline briefly saw patches of white light as pain pulsated and buzzed through her mind; she hazily drifted in and out of consciousness to the sounds of a baby's cries and images of small children huddled by her bedside before the world swallowed her whole and she disappeared into black.