Chapter Song: Carrion Flowers by Chelsea Wolfe (I don't own!)

Chapter 9: Trapped

Everything was happening so quickly. That's the way it always ended up happening in life or death situations. No, they didn't go in slow motion. They went in fast forward. Attempting to shove their way back out the door would be suicide. They had to run. That was their only option.

The herd inched closer and Riley glanced around frantically to see where they could even go. To the left resided another hallway that had a few walkers, but if they were quick, they could probably dodge them and keep going. This whole thing was risky. They didn't know how many other dead were in here and they could easily get cornered. But time was running low and there wasn't any time to think this over.

"Come on!" she yelled, starting down the hallway just as a rotten hand reached out for her hair.

As she ran for the first walker in their path, the thumping in her chest grew louder and louder until it was all she could hear. She ducked underneath its outstretched hands, her nose filling with the smell of rotting flesh and the chill from its fingertips brushing her bicep.

Shivers crawled down her spine and she didn't look back as she rejoined Carl's side. Not for a second did the hissing and growling get any more distant. These ones were fast. It must have been months since they'd seen anything alive.

"Where are we going?" he shouted.

"Anywhere but here!"

"I got that much!"

How were they even supposed to know where they were going? They were running away from a group of eaters and they had no idea how this school was set up. They were essentially just running blindly until they could find some other way out of here.

They approached rows of classrooms and she ducked into one of them, skidding to a stop and wrenching the door closed. But a walker's hand was in the way and then a few more reached in through the crack. She pushed all of her weight against the door, but it wasn't enough. She rocked back and forth as they tried to barge their way in.

"Carl, help!" she grunted, looking back at him as he retreated further to the other side of the classroom. What was he doing?!

More force to the door caused her to refocus and she dug her heels into the slippery tile. If they died, she was blaming him... But out of the corner of her eye, she saw him pushing the desk across the room. Okay. Good idea. Breathe.

Riley dug deeper, a slimy bead of sweat crawling down her neck and the smell of decay invading her senses. Carl was so close...

And then she was shoved roughly to the floor, slamming against it like a brick plummeting into the water. She quickly rolled over, leaping to her feet to get back to the door, but it was too late. Dead started to flood into the room and she and Carl were corned. Trapped in a corner with a mountain of rotting bodies trying to tear open their insides.

She backed up so that she was lined up with him and the two of them started to inch backwards as the walkers stumbled and tripped over the tables and chairs. The only way out was the way they came...

Blue and blue met and she could see the determination in his eyes. And the panic. They had to try this if they wanted to survive.

Slipping her knife out of her jeans with one hand, she reached over and found his hand with her other. They needed to stick together. Live together, die alone - screw that. Live together, die together.

"Three...," she started.

"Two," he continued.

"One..."

"GO!"

With him in the lead, they made a break for it, ducking and dodging the flurry of blood-tipped fingers and lifeless gray hands. Some she had to shove, others she had to stab in the brain. They were doing alright until they got to the door where many of them were collected. Now they really were trapped. Between two herds. She could barely think straight, but the only trace of open space she saw was at their feet...

"Crawl!" she shouted, letting go of his hand and dropping to the floor.

At this point, she was risking it all. Not like they had much of a choice.

With all haste, she scrambled through the forest of legs, eyes widened with fear as the growling pounded in her eardrums and she was brought sharply back to the past. A time when she was caught in a herd. A time when she had to choose between surviving or family.

Riley's head snapped over to Carl as she reached the very edge. He was out. alive. Not bitten. They actually did it...

Until an eater grabbed onto her leg.

She shoved herself backwards, kicking it in the face and trying to shake it off in a rush of adrenaline and survival instincts. Her hands clawed against the slippery tile beneath her in an attempt to get some traction as she kicked the face off of this thing. Skin started to peel off in thick onion layers, revealing black blood and bone and gore beneath. And then it fell lifeless as a bullet pierced its skull.

Carl bent down to help her to her feet and the two didn't hesitate to start running once more. He kept his gun out as they ran, but didn't fire any shots. A set of double doors appeared at the end of the hallway after they turned the corner and she picked up her pace, bursting through the doors to discover that it was a gymnasium. At least there was another door they could get out of on the other side... Maybe they could lose them that way.

"This way!" she shouted, sprinting straight toward the door and dodging tables as her feet crunched on broken glass.

She slammed into the door at the end of the gymnasium and...

Smash!

Her head snapped back to see what was going on and her heart leaped into her throat, threatening to suffocate her at what she saw.

Carl leaned back on the balls of his feet, right hand tucked to his chest as it oozed thick, crimson blood. Shit, shit, shit... She lurched forward, bending down in front of him, her nostrils filling with the acrid smell of his blood. He must've slipped and sliced his hand open on a shard of glass...

Her panicked blue eyes searched the immediate vicinity for anything that she could use to wrap it up, but she didn't see anything at all. And the eaters had finally crashed through the door. They had to keep moving...

"We have to go," she murmured, helping him to his feet as he pressed his palm flush against his chest to try and stanch the bleeding. "I'll cover you."

He murmured something, but she wasn't able to make it out over the hissing and growling and the blood rushing in her ears. She didn't look back, only focused on moving forward. The range of the inhuman sounds behind them was enough to tell her how close they were.

Carl kept up with her despite the blood pouring from his hand. Good. Good. She could barely think straight and she didn't want to lose him because she couldn't focus on more than one thing at a time.

As they turned the corner, she went for the first door. Right now, anything was better than this. The stitch in her side kept reminding her that she needed to breathe and she couldn't ignore his bleeding hand. That needed tending to before they went much further. To her luck, the door flew wide open as she twisted the knob. It was a closet. Janitor's closet. Nothing inside. By a stroke of pure luck, they'd gotten a break.

Riley held the door wide enough for him to stumble inside and she caught a glimpse of the dead before she shut herself inside with him. Her fingers fumbled for the lock and once that was secure, she looked around the room for anything she could use to block the door further. To her right resided a rolling caddy full of different cleaning supplies. Good enough. She rolled it in front of the door as decaying fists started to rap loudly against the door until it rattled.

But she didn't stop. No, she needed to get Carl's hand wrapped. So she groped around the closet in the darkness, ignoring his requests for her to calm down, and tried to find something - anything.

Her eyes were beginning to adjust more to the darkness and she spotted a pile of cleaning rags. She grabbed a handful and swiftly made her way over to where he had sat down in the corner.

"Hold out your hand," she breathed.

"I can do it...," he murmured.

"No, I got it... It's okay..."

He slowly pulled his palm from his chest and extended it out to her. Taking one of the rags, she sopped up most of the blood. The bleeding seemed to be slowing down a bit, which was good, but the cut looked a bit deep. Maybe it was just the lighting, she couldn't tell... It didn't matter much anyway since they didn't have the option of stitching it up.

Once most of the blood was sopped up, she used the left over rags to bandaged the wound, tightly enough to keep some pressure but loose enough to give it breathing room.

"Thanks," he whispered, pulling his hand back to his chest before leaning back against the wall.

"Don't mention it..." She glanced around before settling down next to him, trying to ignore the banging and growling at the door. "How do you suppose we're going to get out of here?"

He shrugged lightly, eyes glimmering in the dark as he looked at the ground. "We just have to wait, I guess. No other way out."

She drew in a deep breath and leaned her head back against the wall. "I'm going to see if there's anything else in here we can use."

"Riley...just take a breath. We'll have plenty of time in here to do that."

She opened her mouth to protest, but she realized he was right. They'd probably have to wait hours before the walkers lost interest and started to wander away. "Okay...okay."

An unsettling silence fell between the two and she stared blankly into the darkness, mind swirling with memories of close calls and loss that branded themselves into her brain. Back there...that reminded her that they weren't invincible. And that no one could be trusted anymore...

"Thanks for not...for not dying on me back there," she murmured, a pinch of humor in her voice. But she was being serious. The last thing she needed was someone else she had come to trust dying on her. It had happened too many times and she wasn't sure if she could handle it again.

"Same goes for you..." He leaned over slightly to bump her shoulder with his and she couldn't hold back a small smile. "Can't believe Jacob did something like that though...Wonder what he's going to tell the others..."

"Probably that we got swarmed or ran off. Something like that."

"Yeah... Of course right when we get a lead on my dad, we have to get trapped inside a school with a whole herd of walkers... Might as well stop looking. Doubt we're ever going to find them now..."

Riley bit her lip, shooting a glance over at him as he turned his head away and let his shoulders sag. He was probably right but...well they had found that sliced up eater. If Rick and Michonne were anywhere, it had to be nearby, right?

"Hey...we saw that eater...It seemed fresh, so they have to be close, right? All we gotta do is wait and then make a break for it. There has to be another way out of this school. We probably passed a ton of exits while we were trying not to get devoured..."

He looked up, raising an eyebrow. "Since when did you become the hopeful one? Thought you didn't believe in hope..."

"Someone helped me to..." Her breath hitched in her throat and she blinked. What had she just said?

Heat flooded up to her cheeks and she looked away, grateful that it was dark in here. Gosh, why was her stomach twisting in knots? Before he got a chance to speak, she cleared her throat.

"So uh, what do you suggest we do to pass the time?" she asked quickly, stumbling over her words as she struggled to regain her composure.

"Maybe we should...uh play some sort of game? Like one of those questions games?"

A questions game? Alright, she could work with that. Better than sitting here after her awkward confession...

"Okay so umm... I remember when I was younger at a party we used M&M's. Each color had a different question attached to it...but we don't have M&M's...Guess we could just ask each other questions? Whatever pops into our heads?" she asked with a shrug.

"Yeah it'll be easier that way. You go first?" He shifted a bit so he was facing her.

"Okay umm...where are you from originally?"

"King County. What's your last name?"

She had almost forgotten that she never told him that. Didn't seem very important when they were running for their lives every five seconds... "Wilson. Have any pets before this?"

He shook his head. "Nah. Parents thought they were too much work. So where is Riley Wilson from?"

"Macon. Not sure where we are now, but it's about an hour or so from Atlanta. Type of music you like?"

"Uh...I like rock. Pop is not bad either. Just depends I guess...So um...how long were you on your own before we met?"

She bit her lip. He was starting to wander into the more personal territory. "About two weeks. How'd your group get separated?"

"We got uh...attacked by another group. It was...pretty crazy. Gunfire and walkers everywhere. We've been looking for the others since... How did you get separated from your group...?" he asked cautiously.

It was like she was hit with a ton of bricks. She knew he had to be curious about this stuff because what else was there to really talk about? All the stuff before the dead didn't really matter anymore. It wasn't like she couldn't trust him either, it just hurt so much to even think about the past.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have-"

"No, it's...We were practically starving... And we came across a group of hunters...like the ones chasing us before. They had food. They had shelter. But they had a set of rules. No kids allowed. Apparently, we weaken the group. Slow them down. And my group abandoned me and went with them without batting an eye," she murmured, looking down at her lap and biting down on her cheek until she tasted coppery blood.

She had been starving and weak and drained from losing her family and then she was left to die like she was a freaking unwanted pet. And that's why she found it so hard to trust anyone.

Riley had been expecting him to say something, but he didn't. No, instead she felt the warmth of his palm against hers and the reassuring brush of his thumb across the back of her hand.

After a few more moments of silence, she spoke up again. "We should...try to rest a little bit. Then maybe figure a way out of here..."

He pulled his hand away. "Yeah, good idea."

She slid down on her side, with her back to the wall, and used her arms as a pillow since a real pillow wasn't an option. It was hard to fall asleep with the walkers at the door, but eventually she gave in to exhaustion and drifted off into a light sleep.

When she awoke again, Carl was already up. And he was looking at something on the wall... She rolled over on her back and pushed herself to a sitting position, rubbing her eyes until she felt more awake. A small pile of things rested beside her so she figured he had searched the closet for things they might need. She pushed herself to her feet, coming up behind him.

"What are you looking at?" she asked, forcing back a yawn.

"I found a map of the school. Must've been for the janitor to cart stuff around, but...it tells us where all the exits are," he explained, looking back at her.

"Seriously?" She jumped forward, squinting in the darkness to see the faded map on the wall.

Spotting where they were, she tried to pinpoint any other landmarks and an exit just around the corner caught her attention.

"That exit, the one closest to us? We should try for that. And if that doesn't work or it seems to risky, we can cut through the cafeteria and get to the exit across from there," Carl explained, pointing at the locations as he did so.

She nodded her head, a small, determined smile spreading across her lips. They had a plan. That was definitely better than running blind.

"Sounds perfect. What did you find?"

"Some rags, scissors, a bag to put everything in since we lost our last one...Not much but better than nothing." He ripped the paper map off the wall and tucked it into his pocket.

As he spoke, she shifted to the door, quietly moving the caddy of cleaning supplies away, and pressed her ear against it. The growling had died down to quiet moaning and shuffling through the hallway. They must have spread out. Good. That's what they needed.

Her fingers softly pressed the lock to open and she ghosted her fingers over the cool knob before turning it. She then crouched, cracking the door slightly so she could see through the crack. A few eaters were shuffling down the left hallway with their backs to the door. To the right, more of them gathered, some facing toward them, others facing away. They'd have to be very careful...

Riley looked back at Carl, watching him collect the things he found and put them in the bag. He moved to crouch next to her.

"You ready?" he asked.

"Ready as I'll ever be."

"Let's do this."

And then, she opened the door all the way.


A/N: I updated quickly, woo! Thank you for all your kind reviews, because they definitely motivated me to pop this chapter out! So Riley and Carl have got a plan, but is it gonna work out? We'll see ;) How have you guys liked the first season of Fear the Waking Dead? I love it and personally can't wait for season 2! Nick's my favorite but I may be a bit biased since he was in Harry Potter haha. And season 6 of the Walking Dead starts Sunday, are you guys excited for that? Hopefully everyone will be okay at the end of the episode haha. Anyway, thanks for all the support and reviews and I really hope you enjoyed this chapter! Will hopefully have the next one up soon!