Summary: The Governor attacks the prison.
HOURS EARLIER
~ Oliver ~
I don't remember being attacked. We were burning the bodies, and the next thing I know, I'm waking up a camper van, bleeding and in pain. The Governor apologises, says he didn't mean to hit me so hard. He even patches my temple up.
Hershel and Michonne are sitting across from me, their hands bound like mine. We're offered food, we're told we won't get hurt, and we're told this isn't supposed to be personal.
"Michonne," the Governor says, "I want you to know — Penny, my daughter. She was dead. I know that now. I don't wanna hurt you. I don't wanna hurt anyone. I need the prison, that's it. There're people that I need to keep alive. And you three are gonna help me take it. No one needs to die."
And she says, "I'm gonna kill you..."
And he says, "No, you won't."
I don't understand what they're talking about but that hardly matters. I'm not saying anything anyway. I have nothing to say.
The Governor doesn't want to be called the Governor anymore. When Hershel tries to negotiate, the Governor make sure we understand that he doesn't want to find a way for our two groups to live together.
"You're a good man, Hershel," he says. "Better man than Rick."
"You've changed. So has Rick."
Changed from what? What did Rick do?
I guess the Governor notices I'm confused. He tells me Rick isn't the saviour he's been chalked up to be, that, "He made an army and shot up my whole town."
"You kidnapped our people!" Michonne shouts.
"And you… killed my daughter!"
"She was dead — you had her corpse chained up like a dog!"
My mind reels.
Hershel tries to find a way to make things work.
"I'VE FOUND A WAY!" the Governor bellows in his face.
He says he's trying hard to do this right, that there are all kinds of ways he can do it wrong, that this way, we get to live and he gets to be… only, he doesn't finish his sentence — or perhaps that was the end of his sentence.
"You say you want to take this prison as peacefully as possible?" Hershel asks, stopping the Governor half way out of the door. "But my daughters are in there, and they'll get hurt. If you understand what it's like to have a daughter, then how can you threaten to kill someone else's?"
And all he says is, "Because they aren't mine."
After that, he and his army drive us to the prison and make us kneel before the fences, the grass damp and itchy under my knees, I put all my effort into breathing, needing my inhaler already.
At his summoning, Rick comes down from the courtyard, past the garden, to the fence between us.
"Let them go, right now," he begs the Governor, eyes wet, voice hoarse. "I'll stay down here, talk as long as you want. But you let them go. You got a tank. You don't need hostages."
"I do, to show you I'm serious. Not to blast a hole in our new home. You an' your people — you have 'til sundown to get out of here, or they die."
"It doesn't have to go down this way."
"I got more people. More fire power. We need this prison. There it is. It's not about the past. It's about right now."
Rick is shaking.
"There are children here. Some— Some of them are sick. They won't survive."
"I have a tank," the Governor says. "An' I'm letting you walk away from here. What else is there to talk about?"
I watch Rick's mind work overtime.
"I can shoot you all," the Governor says, "an' y'all would shoot back. I know that. And we'll win and you'll be dead. All o' you. But it doesn't have to be like that. Like I said, it's your choice, Rick…"
There are walkers coming.
The Governor shoots them one at a time with a pistol.
"Noise will only draw more of them over," he says. "The longer you wait, the harder it'll be for you to get out of here."
The Governor looks up to the sky, squinting.
"You got maybe an hour of sunlight left," he says. "I suggest you start packin'."
Desperately, Rick stares at him, then us, then the Governor again.
"We can all... live together. There's enough room for all of us."
"More than enough. But I don't think my family would sleep well knowin' that you were under the same roof."
"We'd live in different cell blocks," Rick says. "We'd never have to see each other 'till we were all ready."
"It could work," Hershel encourages. "You know it could."
"Not after Woodbury."
"I'm not sayin' it'll be easy," Rick debates. "Fact is, it's gonna be a hell of a lot harder than... standin' here, shootin' at each other, but I don't think we have a choice."
"We don't. You do."
Rick's face folds up like curtains.
"We're not leaving," he replies. "Try your forces. We'll fight back. Like you said, gunshots'll jus' bring more of them out, they'll take down the fences, and without the fences this place is worthless. Now. We can all live in the prison, or none of us can."
"I'll fix the damn fences."
Impatiently, the Governor climbs down from the tank. He takes Michonne's katana from one of his soldiers. I hear it leave its sheath. I hear him walk out behind the three of us and I scrunch up my eyes, bunch my shoulders, hold my breath.
He stands behind Hershel, the steel kissing his throat.
"You," Rick shouts, "in the pony tails, is this what you want?"
Whoever he speaks to must not answer.
"Is this what any of you want?!" Rick asks desperately.
I'm so afraid. I am so, so afraid.
"What we want is what you got, period," someone yells. "Time for you to leave asshole!"
"Look," Rick insists. "I fought him before. And after, we took in his old friends. They've become leaders in what we have here! Now if you put down your weapons, walk through those gates... you're one of us."
Nobody says anything.
Nobody moves.
Rick keeps talking.
"We let go of all of this. And nobody dies. Everyone is alive right now. Everyone has made it this far. We've all done worse kinds of things just to stay alive!
"But we can still come back.
"We're not too far gone.
"We get to come back.
"I know — we all — can change."
The world lets Rick's words hang in the air for a moment. Everything is still. The Governor allows his weapon to lower from Hershel's neck...
Until that moment ends.
"Liar."
We all hear his whisper, and then the swish of Michonne's katana swinging in his grip — through Hershel's neck. I hear the sound of his windpipe severing, his choked gargles, and I see the wide gap in his throat, the blood, gushing crimson across his collar, and the slow way Hershel drops to the grass like a rock.
And I just watch.
The noise attacks me first — the screams — the gunfire — everywhere. And Hershel. He's still alive. I try to call out to him but I'm crying so hard I can't breathe. I watch the Governor kneel down to him and sever his head from his body. I try to scream but someone shoves me onto my stomach — Michonne — shouting at me — urging me to move.
Bullets thud to the ground by our chests.
We roll towards cover, our binds bruising our wrists.
"The trucks," she orders. "Keep going!"
Finally, we make it behind a truck. I get to my feet. We run in tandem, weaving our way desperately through the chaos. Michonne finds a broken number plate on the back of a truck and uses it to cut away at her ropes. A spray of bullets hit the car next to me and I flinch. Michonne tells me to get down, to wait for her. I do. A man is running towards her.
"Michonne!"
In an instant, she throws out her leg and he trips and hits the floor. I watch her crush his windpipe with her boot. As he suffocates to death, I retch until I yack across the grass. It's not until I'm done that I realise Michonne has cut my hands free. I clutch my gut and rub my sore wrists, the skin red and raw.
"Here..."
She pulls my machete out of his hands and gives it back to me. Out of breath, I strap it around my waist, coughing and spitting.
"GO THROUGH THE FENCES! IN YOUR CARS! GET YOUR GUNS! WE GO IN!"
Michonne yanks me behind the truck. When the engine starts, we have to move. She pulls me towards the trees, away from the prison. I fight against her. The trucks and tank move away, towards the fences.
"Michonne, no!"
"KILL THEM ALL!"
"Oliver, get down!"
With a hard shove, I'm flattened into the long grass. Bullets fly overhead. The tank bulldozes through the fence like it's made of plastic. The sound hurts my ears. As the trucks go inside the fences, they destroy the gardens, the paddocks — Flame escapes, galloping along the fence, screaming this scream I didn't know horses could make.
As the Governor's soldier's leave their trucks and move in with their guns, familiar faces and strange ones scatter across the prison. The walkers are coming, from the woods. Michonne and I run towards the prison to escape them. Hershel's body lies where the governor killed him, Michonne's katana by his side.
She takes the katana with shaking hands, then uses it to cut the nearest walker's head in half. I pull my machete from my thigh and start taking walkers out, too. Most of them aren't even noticing us, simply passing by into the loud and distracting prison.
Michonne rushes on, a strange, far away look on her face. I follow her, dodging walkers who lose interest in me when they smell the fresh bodies scattering the ground.
Soon, we find the Governor and Rick fighting by the gate. Rick is losing, pinned down, bleeding and turning purple.
Michonne ends him, and when the Governor is dead, Rick pushes his body away. Michonne flicks blood off her katana. Rick grabs me, wheezing worse than I am. One of his eyes is bloodshot, the other bruised. His leg is bleeding.
Michonne helps him to his feet.
"C— Carl," Rick rasps. "Where's Carl?"
"I don't know," she whispers.
Rick stumbles away from her.
"CARL!"
I go with him, pushing against him so he doesn't collapse. He's been shot in the thigh and can't carry his own weight on that side and I'm so short of breath I can't even cough. Instead, I take big, forced gulps of air that hurt.
Another explosion goes off. It blows apart the look-out bridge between C and D. Debris and rubble rocket off in all directions. There's another explosion. Rick staggers to his knees, taking me with him. I hear walkers. I grow exhausted, choking on my tightening windpipe. I don't know why I'm so surprised that this is how I'm going to die. Not walkers or bullets or other people. It makes sense that I'm going to suffocate to death.
"CARL!" Rick screams. "CARL!"
He leans against the tank. The cockpit door at the top and the end of the cannon are on fire. There is a walker limping after us. I trudge forward and crack my machete through its skull, only I'm too spent to yank the blade out again so as the walker falls, I go down on top of it.
I feel like I'm drowning. Really drowning. Breathing is like drinking through a straw if someone were to pinch the middle. Rick tries to pull me up, tries to tell me to get up, but I can barely look at him. He doesn't understand why. I don't have the energy to beg him to find my inhaler.
There are walkers coming and — and two bullets fire and they both drop to the courtyard. I'm so exhausted I don't even flinch. I just wait for something to sink its teeth into me, for my brain to shut down.
It just takes a couple minutes, right?
A couple minutes without air to die?
Something yanks me to sit up. I anticipate teeth. Something smooth and plastic is pushed in my mouth and a cold, familiar, chemical taste sprays my tongue.
"Breathe, Oliver!"
And struggle, but I do, and it doesn't start to work right away so Carl keeps squeezing the cartridge. Again and again. It burns. I have to shove him away from me. He stumbles back. I breathe, inhaler in my hand, gasping and wincing and burning — and breathing.
"Are you okay?"
I nod, grunting through my a sore throat and mouth.
"Judith," Rick rasps. "Where is she?"
Carl is trembling. "I don't know."
We search for the bus to see if it got away. We don't find it as ws we cross the courtyard. I don't know where Michonne went. Carl has to help both me and his father walk. It isn't long before we spot the lonely baby carrier. It is faced away. Even with Carl's help, Rick becomes heavier and heavier the closer we get. I beg to God for this all to be some type of bad dream. All of it. I'll wake up in my cell to Carol telling me and Patrick to go harvest the coriander. I'll listen to music. I'll do kitchen duty. I'll read comics with Carl.
Don't let this be real.
Please, don't let it be real…
But it is.
The blood.
It's real and it fills the baby carrier, soaking into the seat. Rick wails. I stumble out of his grip, heaving, and everything left in my stomach comes up and out of me. I startle when I hear gunshots. Carl empties his rifle into a walker, even after it is dead, sobbing. He runs out of shells but keeps firing anyway, the bolt clacking emptily. Carl screams. Rick has to grab him to get him to stop. They cry together.
I focus on breathing until Rick grabs me.
"We gotta go. It's over."
We stagger across the courtyard. Walkers fill the prison. I see their faces. People from my block. Some guy who always called me 'Patrick Two-Point-O'. A girl who lived next door to me. She gnaws down on another dead man's ankle. He was from B block. He collected old coins.
I don't want to be here.
Not here…
WIthout the bus, we have to leave on foot. The way the Governor came in is swarmed with walkers so we're forced to escape through the office blocks, through the locked door, out to the parking lot where we pull the blockage in the fence down.
We climb through one after the other.
We leave.
And it is over.
Our home is gone, burnt to the ground under bullets and tank tracks.
As we reach the crest of a nearby wooded hill, Carl tries to glance back to see the ruins of the prison, but Rick pulls him around before he can.
"Don't look back," he says. "Carl, jus' keep walkin'..."
Notes
Thanks for reading! If you want to read the rest (100+ chapters) feel free to find it on archive of our own 'Stale M&M's (Carl Lives)' by notmuchmoretosay.
As always,
Happy reading.