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RosesRred45- Thank you, always means a lot to hear some thoughts! Thank you for reading!
Chapter warning: Includes graphic descriptions of gore and physical abuse. Nothing terrible, but if you're very sensitive to those sorts of themes, you might want to approach with caution. :)
It's the day of the dry run.
Carl and I bring Judith in her pushchair as we help everyone load up the cars with boxes of flares and ammunition.
"It's just a dry run," Rick tells Carl when he sees the worried expression his son can't wipe. "Nothin' dangerous."
"I know," Carl tells him. "Jus' be careful anyway."
I find Sasha sitting in her car, tapping her hands against the steering wheel, itching to leave. "Be careful," I warn her, poking my head through the open window.
She nods, looking at me weird. "You taking my watch in the tower?"
I shake my head, "Mikey said Spencer's got it."
Abraham makes me jump when he appears behind me, patting my shoulder before stepping to the far side of the car and riding shotgun. "I will keep her head attached to her shoulders, young man."
I nod at them both, sure I'm looking just as worried as Carl was.
"Did you cut your hair?" Sasha asks me, finally revealing why she's looking at me funny.
"Oh, no... I mean- yeah... it has been cut- but Jesse did it." I run my hand through it self-consciously.
"Wow," Abraham chuckles, "you make that sentence all by yourself?"
Sasha glares at him, unamused. "Looks good," she tells me.
I shrug, swinging my foot back and forth, kicking at nothing because I can. "Yeah, well, it was getting too long."
"It's still long..." Sasha points out.
"Yeah, but, less long than it was, it was getting too curly."
She rolls her eyes at my vagueness.
Carl and I watch as everyone leaves, Minnie getting the gate behind them. Twenty-five people that we have to worry about for the rest of the day, heading out.
Me and Carl make our way home with Jude. I wave at Dani as we pass by the classroom, school being something that no one's really thought about over the last few days. The younger kids are still going, but since two of us older kids dads are dead, we've not been recalled. Tara and Eugene head past us on their way to the clinic, Eugene, saying that Tara 'requires' aspirin for her head after working on the new watchtower all day. Holly is with them, and since they've been flirting for the past month on and off, I give Tara some not-so-subtly raised eyebrows, making her both laugh and punch my shoulder hard. Carol also walks by us, undercover chirping about how she's making a 'spring cleaning casserole.'
Ron and Enid are sitting on the lake's bank as we pass, their backs to us as they look out over the calm waters."Carl? Rhys?"
We both stop, recognising the voice of Father Gabriel behind us. We turn to meet him.
"What?" Carl asks bluntly. After hearing about what happened on the night of the meeting, Carl has been pissed at Gabriel. Not only had he attacked Sasha and me in his church, but apparently, he also went to Deanna the day before, warning her that she can't trust our group.
"What I told Deanna about your group..." he looks between us. I see he's holding his arm where I had stabbed him. I try not to feel guilty, annoyed at how difficult that is for me. "It was about me... not you or your group... I know that now. I want to help."
"Help how?" I ask.
Gabriel explains that Carl offered to teach him how to defend himself back at his church. He tells Carl he's ready to learn now.
Carl looks at me, unsure.
"Come by around three," I tell the priest.
Carl gives a tight-lipped smile, nodding, adding, "We'll start with the machete."
Gabriel thanks us graciously, appending that Maggie wanted to see me in the expansion area.
Once Gabriel is gone, I blow too much air from my cheeks, a feeble attempt to release some pent-up tension.
"Why'd you want to help him?" Carl asks.
"Dunno," I answer truthfully.
Carl grins at me. "You're a saint."
I snort at him. "Right..."
"Go see Maggie," he tells me when we reach home. "I'll take Judith in."
I see Sam sitting on the porch steps of 101, head in his hands, looking particularly sad. When Carl goes in, I sit with Sam. There's a hand stamper on the steps next to him, the same one he was running around and using on everyone at the welcome party. I know the red letter A that it stamps is for Alexandria, but I can only think of the letter the Termites used to torment us at the church. Sam snatches it up when I look at it for too long.
"Carol said my dad used to hit me and that he got himself killed," Sam tells me. "She said I have to live with it, or it eats me up."
"Carol can say mean things," I tell him.
"But she's right, right?"
I feel horrible for nodding, but I do, and Sam looks even sadder for it.
"Go home, Sam," I tell him.
I find Maggie where Gabriel said I would- outside Alexandria and in the expansion area. Right now, it's little more than an overgrown field beyond the perimeter of the walls, but Maggie and Deanna have plans to turn this into farmland, more walls to protect it, and more buildings for people to live in and tend to it.
I find the prospect of becoming a farmer soothing, deciding I might like to do that one day.
It takes me a while to reach them since the new plot is on the opposite side of Alexandria to the entrance.
Deanna is out here, both her and Maggie digging at the ground with shovels.
I wave the way I always tend to... awkwardly.
"You asked for me?"
"That I did," Maggie grins. "We're gonna start on planting crops, thought you might want to learn."
"Sure... what are we planting?"
"Tomatoes, carrots, you name it... they found crates of them at a nursery just a few miles out."
Maggie does try to warn me about sore backs and tired feet, but after less than an hour of working, I'm already complaining.
"Stop diggin' with your back," Maggie tells me.
"Then with what?" I huff, knowing my face is probably red and sweaty.
"You're whole body," Deanna says, "put your weight into it."
I don't enjoy being ridiculed, but seeing Deanna smile is somewhat rare and pleasing since Reg died, so I put up with it and nod along with her advice.
But these moments never last. It doesn't seem possible for them to.
Our work is halted by a gutwrenching scream, cut short, coming from inside our walls.
"Richard!" Deanna calls up to who's on guard atop the wall. "What's going on in there?" He's staring into the community with a look of horror. And before he can answer, there's a sound of glass shattering as a bottle hits him, thrown from out here. Rickard's entire body ignites, flames erupting from his skin as he screams, tumbling off the wall towards us.
Maggie yanks Deanna and me out of the body's landing zone, pulling her gun, searching for who threw the molotov, but smoke discharging from Richard's corpse blinds us. Deanna's sobbing at the sight of his mangled body. The smell pushes me to vomit all over the ground we just dug.
Somewhere in the distance, a truck horn starts blaring.
Maggie takes aim as she sees a man climbing the wall and into the community through the smoke, but he's over before she can pull the trigger.
"Come on!" Maggie yells, racing back to the gate. I grab Deanna's arm, pulling her when she doesn't move, her whole body frozen as she stares down at Richard.
It takes a painfully long time to get around the wall, the earsplitting horn stopping at some point.
We pass Sasha's watchtower on our way around, we find Spencer at its base, a truck too.
"They tried to drive through the wall," he tells his mom, "I s-stopped them."
His hands are shaking, and I see the dead driver slumped over the wheel, a dozen bullet holes in the windscreen.
"You stopped that horn?" Deanna asks her son.
He's shaking his head. The twenty-somthing-year-old is covered in unknown blood.
"We need to get inside," I pull on Maggie's arm impatiently. "Carl and Judith, they're in there!"
"Mikey..." Spencer mumbles his brother's name. "He's on his own. At home."
"Let's go," Maggie tells us as Deanna embraces her eldest.
Deanna shakes her head. "I can't go in there..." she tells Maggie, her voice wavering. "I don't have a gun... I don't know how to fight... If I go inside, I'll just be another person who's got to be saved."
Maggie nods, agreeing. "Keep her safe..." she tells Spencer.
"I will," he says, helping his mum into the truck and shutting her in.
Maggie and I race our way into the community.
Inside lives chaos...
Bodies lie in the streets, in the grass, the lake. Everything dead. Mutilated corpses are cut up and spread across every road. Screams are coming from homes with kicked open doors.
The words 'wolves not far' are scratched across one of the houses.
"It's them..." I mutter.
"Who?" Maggie asks, aiming her revolver in every direction as we cautiously step through the community.
"Wolves not far..." I whisper over morbid memories. "That was written at Noah's home... at Shirewilt... where Tyreese..." I trail off.
Maggie spots one of them. One of the wolves. A giant, hacking at a corpse with a rusted fire axe, splitting the body apart against the concrete with deafening metallic clangs, sparks spitting from each strike. Maggie doesn't hesitate. Two shots into his back. He's dead. I recognise the tangled limbs of the corpse as Mrs Neudermyer, and I resist the urge to vomit again.
We spot Tara and Rosita hauling a sliced up Holly towards the infirmary. Maggie tugs my arm towards them.
"Go," I tell her.
"Rhys..." she growls.
"No!" I yell, pulling free of her. "Go help them... I'll check on Mikey, then Judith and Carl."
She looks like she wants to scream at me. To tell me to stop being a child and listen to her. But she doesn't. She nods. Then she takes off running towards the infirmary.
My gun shakes, clasped between my sweaty hands as I jog towards the Brownstone apartments.
I see Natalie Miller, the sweet old lady that babysits for Judith on occasion, one of the first to hold Judith here. She's dead and in pieces, her blue cardigan stained red.
I don't stop.
I keep moving.
I'm confused when I see Morgan standing over a dead wolf. Carol is crouched beside the body, wearing ragged clothes as she paints a W on her forehead using the wolf's blood. The same marking that they have.
"Are you all back?" I call to Morgan, running up on the two of them. The idea of Rick and the other returning fills me with hope.
"No," Morgan says, deflating my hope. "I came back early... the dry run went wrong... we're moving the horde now."
Dread washes over me, replacing all that potential hope, but I force it out. One bad thing at a time.
Carol gets up, wolf camouflage suiting her.
"We have to get to the armoury before they do," she tells us.
"No- Carol-" Morgan tries.
"She's right," I cut him off. "I don't think they have guns."
"This would be over if they did," Carol agrees with me.
"We don't have to kill people..." Morgan hisses at us.
"Of course we do!" Carol snaps back.
"I have to go," I tell them both, not having time for the debate. "Good luck."
The first porch step of the Monroe household creeks as I set my foot atop it.
I climb with my gun raised.
The front door has been bashed in, bloody footprints leading inside.
I follow them. Through the door. Up the stair. Across the landing.
"Mikey?" I call out softly, approaching the door that the footprints stop at, rest my hand on the doorknob and listening.
Suddenly it bursts open, dirt and blood rushing at me, a man three times my size swatting my gun away before I can think, sending it flying down the stairs. He lifts me from the ground, both of us splintering through the bannisters behind me. Falling, crashing, bleeding, we land, rolling the rest of the way down the stairs, reaching the ground floor in a mass of pain and grunts.
Everything hurts as I try to stand, my breath gone as I gasp at nothing. I hear a knife being drawn behind me. I crawl away, desperately looking for my gun, spotting it ahead of me. But the wolf is too fast, kicking the gun aside and grabbing a fistful of my hair, tossing me into the living room, my body screaming in pain as I go through the glass coffee table.
I flail my arms at him, kicking and screaming at him as he flips me over onto my stomach, pushing the side of my face into the floor, crushing my skull against the ground and glass, brandishing his knife before my eyes.
"You're trapped," he growls, his long matted hair falling over my face, his yellow teeth bared in a sadistic smile. "We will free you."
I scratch frantically at his wrists, and he brings my head up, slamming it back down into the ground. I choke out a gasp, the pain too much to vocalise. Everything I see is double. I worry I might pass out.
"No... stop. Fuck. Please!" I beg him, but he just presses his hand into my head harder. My skull feels like it's going to pop against the floor.
I feel his knife press behind my ear, scoring the skin. "You don't belong... this will be slow. But you will be freed... just be still."
He flicks his wrist. I scream. Blood gushes across my face, into my eyes, my mouth and nose, filling me as the man tosses my ear aside, carved from the side of my head.
"Be still. You will be free," he snarls again. I feel him press the blade to my cheek, blood from my removed ear pooling over the rusted blade. I hear ringing. Ringing and blood. Then a smash, the man letting go and collapsing to my side.
It happens all at once. Mikey is beside me, dropping the lamp he just broke over the wolf's head. He starts desperately trying to pull me away from the dirty man as he rises to his feet.
Mikey can't lift me, and I can't stand. He tries begging the man to stop... but he doesn't stop... he casts Mikey to the floor, clambering on top of him and putting his knife to Mikey's throat. But I was pulled far enough. I find my gun beside me this time, letting five bullets hit the man's chest, his knife clattering to the floor, his body following shortly after.
"Fuck..." I gasp, clutching the side of my head, blood running, through my fingers, down my arm and into my green flannel.
"Rhys," Mikey coughs, winded, rising to his feet and trying to help me. His hands are shaking, and he can't lift me.
"Fuck!" I scream louder, only just realising the gravity of what that man took.
"What- what do we..." Mikey trails off, staring at the dead body in the middle of his living room, watching as wolf blood stains deep into the carpet.
"Carl and Judith," I rasp. There are glass shards embedded in my cheek, the hole left by my missing ear is bleeding profusely. "I need to get to them."
"your ear," Mikey looks horrified, grabbing me again. "Shouldn't we go to the infirmary?"
"No," I push him off me, trying to stand but failing. Everything inside my body hurting. The blood still oozing from my head.
Mikey grabs a towel from the closet, pressing it against my ear and making me hold it in place. He gets under my arm, helping me to my feet.
We stumble from the house. My chest is bruised from the fall, sense of direction spinning, everything on my left side sounding off, like the choice directions don't exist anymore, only forward.
Mikey hauls me down the street, and I keep my gun held tight, but I don't see anyone living, only dead. One of the bodies makes us stop. It's Dani, barely recognisable, dead at the doorstep of her classroom. Mikey starts crying when we keep moving, tripping and stumbling, as he leads us towards a building. I can't make it out, my head twisting with pain.
"Where..." I mumble, feeling light-headed. Everything keeps flickering between black and light.
"Rhys!?" I hear a familiar voice. "What the fuck happened?"
"Rosita," Mikey whimpers, "His ear... one of those people... they-"
I almost vomit from how much everything is spinning, how distorted the world sounds, how light I feel.
"Fuck." Someone is grabbing me, taking me from Mikey, I think it's Rosita.
I'm pretty sure we're inside now because I hear a door close.
"Jesus Christ, dude... what the..."
"Tara... get Dennise!"
"Okay, okay!"
Someone's lying me down, taking my gun.
"Oh god... is that Holly? Is she dead?"
"I need you to stand back, Mikey!"
Someone's touching my face, their hands comforting and warm.
"What did this?"
"A knife... it was a knife..."
"Okay..."
"Can you fix it!?" someone shouts.
"He's lost a lot of blood..."
"I swear to god... you fix him, or I will fucking-"
"Rosita, calm down, let Denise work."
"Don't tell me to calm down, Tara! Look at him!"
All the voices are so confusing. I try to open my eyes, to work out who's speaking, but there's so much blood in them, I have to keep them shut.
"Where did Maggie go?" the angrier voice is asking.
"With Aaron- to help people out there."
"Shit."
Everyone's talking. It's so hard to keep up with them. I can hear a faint hissing, as something is put over my face.
"I have to put him under. I can't fix him like this."
-Carl's POV-
I watch from the living room window as people run from the invaders, tripping and dying to their blows. I think about helping... then I think about Judith.
The back door grabs my attention, the doorknob rattling as someone opens it. I rush there, aiming my rifle, only it's Enid, a spare set of keys in her hand.
"Hi?" she looks at the gun. I lower it.
"Why didn't you just knock?" I ask, barging past her to shut and lock the door.
"I have these," she holds up the keys. "Didn't want them to have them."
I push past her again, checking the front door. Enid follows me through to the living room. "I wanted to say goodbye," she adds.
"Okay," I ignore her, "watch the back door. Tell me if you see them coming."
"I'm not staying..."
"You're not going anywhere... sit down. You're helping me protect Judith. They're not getting inside this house."
To my surprise, she does sit, right in the middle of the living room, facing the backdoor. I join her, facing the front, our backs pressed together.
"Where's Rhys?" Enid whispers, sounding afraid of someone hearing.
"Not here," I tell her louder, knowing no one will.
"Where then?"
"He was outside the walls... with Maggie."
"You're not going after him?"
"I have to look after Judith," I tell her. "He knows that. He'll find somewhere safe. Now isn't the time to run around saving people... he'll know that too."
"Okay."
"Where's Ron?" I ask, clearing my throat when the giant room feels stuffy.
"I don't know..." Enid sighs. "I wasn't going to tell him goodbye."
"Did you see them?" I ask, sitting up straight to peer out the window.
"They're just people... but this place is too big to protect. Too many blind spots... that's how we sneak out."
"They got in the walls," I tell her. "But they're going to die... all of them."
I listen to her breaths, her body rising and falling against mine.
"Don't tell me goodbye..." I whisper.
"Okay... I won't."
A/N
Here we go...
Rest in peace to Dani, a teacher that Mikey loved.
Rest in peace to Shelly Neudermyer. She washed the blood from Rhys' poncho, and she never did get that pasta maker.
Rest in peace to Natalie Miller, the first Alexandrian to properly welcome the boys.
Something so terrible and joyous about chapters like this, getting to plant background characters just to turn into mildly shocking cannon fodder.
There may be a delay on the release of next weeks chapter, life being busy and such. I'll try my best to get it up on time though!
:(
Next time: The threat inside the walls dealt with, a new issue occurs beyond them.