Ace stood frozen, heart stopped. Her mouth was agape as she trailed his body's path to the ground. Carl was lifeless and still, blood curled down around his cheek and pooled on the ground around his face.

She could see the look in Rick's eyes, the way his face fell as he stared at his son. It was the same look she imagined when she thought about the first time Carl had been shot—Rick was there to see that as well. But this was it, wasn't it?

Carl was dead.

Rick didn't seem to think so, because he was on the ground immediately to scoop his son into his arms. Michonne desperately cleared a path for him as they sprinted towards the infirmary, tens of walkers following them in a giant clump. They were too distracted to notice how Ace hadn't moved since the gunshot.

Ace was convinced he was dead, how could someone live after that? Crazier things had happened, she knew that—Phineus Gage survived a spike blast through his frontal lobe with only lobotomy-like narcissism. Maybe if the bullet only penetrated as deep as the eye, Carl could have lived. But she couldn't convince herself to follow after them and find out. The group didn't have a doctor anymore, aside from Denise, but Ace wasn't confident that she would know how to fix it after everything Isaac had told her.

But they were headed to the infirmary.

That meant there was a chance, right? Probably not, Ace realised, but either way, she knew that they weren't going to make it safely if she didn't stop the group of walkers that were following behind them. She had to do something.

So she pulled out her gun, aimed it at the hundreds of bodies and began shooting, which turned some of the walkers around, splitting the group in two—just what they needed to get away. Her eyes scanned for a path to follow them before she took off sprinting.

Ace had to force herself to focus as she ducked under the arms that were reaching for her, the walkers that now realised she was not one of them. When she caught up, she stayed just behind Rick and kept gunning down the walkers that chased after him.

Her gun clicked, empty, so Ace holstered it and grabbed the axe instead. It found its mark in the rotting skulls with practised precision, moving the way Michonne taught her so she didn't lose her weapon.

"Ace! On your left!" Michonne's warning came over her shoulder just in time. Ace turned and drove the pick of her axe into the eye socket of a walker that nearly blindsided her before she caught a glimpse of Carl's limp body in Rick's arms in front of her.

Don't be dead, she thought desperately. Please, don't you dare die on me, Carl.

They were getting there, closing in on the infirmary that was dimmed out—if there was anyone inside they were hiding it, well, that was until a light flicked on. Her chest lurched with relief and hope as she saw Denise's silhouette through the window. She was pointing, moving fast, gathering supplies. She'd seen us coming.

There was a group of walkers, moving in unison more tightly and closed in than there had been when Rick and Michonne had taken off—they weren't distracted by the bodies of the Anderson family by the infirmary.

Ace steadied her stance, but her hands trembled as she twirled the axe in her hands, stepping around to now face the infirmary.

"Rick," she began, praying he heard her. As much as she wanted to check out of this moment, she had to be present to keep them alive, "When I say go, run straight for the infirmary. Don't stop for anything! Michonne, watch our backs!"

She didn't hear them respond or acknowledge her, but she didn't wait for it either. Ace took a deep breath and charged ahead, the first walker went down, then the second. She dodged under the greedy arms, her body moving on pure adrenaline.

"Go! Now!" she shouted.

Pushing more corpses aside, Ace created a narrow path for them to follow. Rick sprinted past her, and Carl held tightly to his chest. Michonne was close behind, slicing the walkers around them down with her sword.

As soon as they were on the front porch, the door opened with Denise standing behind it. She had seen them and was preparing to get ready to help Carl. As they entered, she was already in motion, directing Rick on where to put Carl down. Ace followed Michonne inside, watching Rick place his son down on a gurney.

With the door shut behind them, the change in sound and scenery made her ears ring. Even with the hurried movement of those around her, Denise's ordering, it was so quiet in comparison to the chaos they had just been through.

"Please save him," Rick pleaded, sounding so broken. "Please."

Please. Ace begged wordlessly. I can't lose him.

Not a single word entered her ears as the others rushed around to do what Denise needed, but even as Ace silently begged for them to save Carl, she doubted that he was even alive at that moment in time. Just staring down at him, the wound, how gruesome it looked.

Could someone actually survive a gunshot wound to the head? Even if Carl had survived the gunshot, even if he was alive there and then, what life could he have if the bullet pierced his brain? Ace had no faith that Carl was going to live despite everyone trying to help him. She wasn't sure anybody checked his pulse, he could have already died.

There was more silence as Michonne came over to her, lifting the bloodied sheet from over her head, shook her shoulder and said something as she just stared down at the gurney. Her mind flicked between seeing him shot at the farm and the way he looked now.

How could she have let this happen? She should have known that Ron was in trouble when they had that fight in the house, which she was certain had to have been a fight at that point, and because she didn't try to step in, Carl was dead.

The first sound that broke through was Michonne calling out, "Rick! Rick!"

Her head turned to the door as she saw Rick step onto the porch and start slicing down the walkers with a hatchet. He was out of it, Ace realised. He was out of it like when Lori died and he was going to get himself killed. He was going to die . . . if he did it alone.

She wasted no time following him.

"Ace!" Aaron called.

She didn't listen before slamming the door closed behind her, axe already in hand as she followed Rick down the stairs, swinging the axe around and stabbing a walker, almost getting the pick caught in the railing. She flipped the axe over and chased after Rick, swinging it side to side to take out the walkers that were following his path.

Before Rick could swing his axe back around to hit her, she stopped it with her hand and pushed it away before Rick realised who she was. He looked her up and down before turning back to the walkers that surrounded them.

"I'm with you," she said.

Rick didn't have much time to respond before he axed down the next walker, but he didn't try and stop her either. She came up beside him to help kill the walkers, keep him alive, though Rick didn't look the same as when he'd lost himself back at the prison or with Pete—he was more focused now, he knew exactly what he was doing.

They moved together, their weapons slicing through the air and finding purpose in rotting flesh. The walkers all around seemed endless, converging from all sides. Ace's breath came in short, sharp gasps, her muscles and lungs burning with exertion.

Rick swung, his axe embedded itself in the skull of a walker that had gotten too close. He yanked it free, dark red splattering across his already bloodied features. She wondered what the point of taking off the sheets was if they were just going to come out and do this.

Any thought of Carl that came to mind she shoved aside, the idea of losing him, of not doing enough to save him, the fact that he was almost certainly dead at this point. She couldn't think about it if she wanted to stay alive. She thought the distraction would have been to save Rick, but Rick was more hopeful that they could win this fight.

Ace was the one who felt blood-curdling dread this time.

But they weren't alone anymore, because everyone who had been helping Denise in the infirmary had rushed out to help them. Heath, Spencer and Michonne formed a circle with her and Rick, while Aaron took his place on the other side of her.

"Knock 'em away. Drive 'em down," Rick ordered. "We can beat 'em. We can beat 'em! Drive 'em back. That's it. We can do this together!"

And they weren't the only ones to come out to help, because not moments later, Eric and Olivia had run out to help fight. Martinez, Rosita and Eugene. Carol and Morgan. Gabriel and some of the others that had hidden in the church. Ace couldn't keep track of everyone, but they were fighting to take down the herd together.

Maybe this was a fight that they could win.

"They're out there," Isaac was mainly trying to distract himself at that point. The walkers were destroying the platform they were standing on and he didn't know how long it was going to hold out before they had to climb on the fence with Maggie and wait it out. "They're trying to fight the herd."

The scope only helped so much, and Isaac could barely make out the figures in the dark. He didn't see Carl, not anymore—he only partly worked out what happened when he heard the shot go off just ahead of them, and he saw Rick picking his son up off of the ground.

They had been walking around with zombie guts covering them, and the walkers just ignored them. He didn't know—didn't want to know how they ever came up with that idea, but he knew that he would never be trying something like that.

Either way, he needed to get down to Ace.

"Isaac," Maggie said worriedly as the platform shook more and more.

She was now pushing herself from her knees, using the fence to hold herself up. Isaac pulled one of her arms over his shoulder and helped her so she could stand. Maggie could barely stand with her leg as bad as it was, worst-case scenario, they'd have to balance on the fence until help came, not a bad option until you consider that walkers might be able to pile against that too.

"If this starts falling we're going to climb onto that part of the fence and sit it out," Isaac explained, pointing to a corrugated metal sheet that sat just below the top of the wall. "This part is wider, we should be okay there until—"

"HEY!" Yelling and gunshots cut him off, as they both looked down to the road below them. "Over here! Come on, here!"

Isaac frowned, trying to see the new figure in the darkness, "Is that—?"

"Glenn!" Maggie jerked against him, but Isaac kept a hold of her, if she moved too much then the whole thing could come down. "No! Glenn!"

"Maggie!" A new voice came, a girl climbing up the side of the fence to get to them.

"Enid!"

Glenn was still yelling as Enid balanced her way over to them, the same way he imagined he and Maggie were going to have to spend the night. Maggie managed to stand up herself to reach for Enid as she hopped down into the well to join them.

"Help me secure it," she said, handing him some fabric that had been cut up.

Isaac nodded, taking a piece of the fabric to tie the watchtower tightly against the wall, holding it steady so it didn't feel like it was going to break apart at any moment . . . well, it was probably moving less now because Glenn was luring the walkers away from them.

When Isaac looked back down to the road,

Maggie tried to shoot from her handgun when it clicked empty. "Shit."

Isaac clenched his teeth as she dropped to the ground sobbing, before standing near the edge of the platform and holding up his rifle, sending off rounds into the closest walkers to Glenn. He didn't have a lot of bullets, so he made them count, lining them up in the crosshair as the knockback kicked his shoulder awkwardly.

"Over here!" Maggie was crying, the words barely audible as Enid held her. "No! Over here!"

"Come on!" Isaac yelled as he shot the walkers around him until his gun too was empty. "This way, come on!"

But Glenn couldn't kill the walkers fast enough, and they were swarming him. Isaac wanted to jump down and help him but he knew he wouldn't last two seconds without going catatonic. He was still yelling, trying to distract the walkers, but they wouldn't turn around.

"Glenn!"

When he ducked below the line of the walkers, disappearing from view, Isaac was going to yell out when streams of bullets rained down on the walkers around him, tearing through the herd that had swarmed Glenn.

Isaac flinched and looked back over his shoulder to the gates where Abraham and Sasha were shooting down with assault rifles and gunning down the hoard, killing the ones around Glenn who was now cowering on the ground for a different reason, trying not to get hit by the bullets.

When the herd was thinned out enough, Abraham turned down to Glenn, "Can you get the gate? Appreciate it, pal."

Then he laughed out loud and continued shooting the walkers. Glenn opened the gate for them and Daryl drove the truck in through, pulling up by the watch tower so they could pick the three up from the platform as Glenn climbed into the front.

"Come on, we got you," Abraham reached up. Isaac helped Maggie step down on top of the van to them first.

"Easy," Isaac said.

"I got her," Abraham helped her onto the top of the van.

Sasha then helped Maggie down the side of the truck while Isaac helped lower Enid to the roof which was much lower than they were, while she was more easily caught by Abraham. Isaac was just able to jump down both levels himself to climb into the truck with the rest of them away from the walkers.

Maggie hugged Glenn in the car the first chance she got, hanging onto him while Abraham started driving them towards the pond in the middle of town, telling him how she missed him and how she knew he'd make it back.

Daryl pulled up in front of the pond and they all climbed out of the truck, looking at the masses of walkers that were still around them. It was going to be a tough fight, and Isaac didn't understand exactly what they were supposed to do. Cut them all down?

"What's the plan?" Isaac asked when they got a moment of quiet. "They're all fighting the herd back there, they need our help."

"Cover our backs," Daryl said, "we're gonna get 'em all in one place, light 'em up."

"Got it," he nodded his mind on how he'd seen Ace and Rick standing in the middle of a hoard. They were the two people he recognised through the darkness and the corpses, and all he could do was hold out hope that they would still be okay by the time they lit up the pond.

They had backed against a wall to the right of their home, the walkers not letting up. Ace was exhausted, the axe heavy in her hands as she pulled it over her shoulder and swung it straight down. She was too close to Aaron to be swinging it around her.

"Fuck," she panted, taking a moment to lean on her knees and catch her breath.

It wasn't long before she had to straighten up to continue the fight, swinging the pick upwards as a last-second reaction to the walker that had gotten closer than she realised. She pulled it back down from its neck, twisting the handle around and slamming it back down into the top of the skull.

"Ace, duck!" Aaron's voice rang out.

Ace dropped down quickly, feeling the whoosh of his weapon passing over her head to take out a walker that had nearly blindsided her. She watched the body fall to the ground next to her before she scrambled to her feet.

"Thanks," she gasped. "Let's not make a habit of that."

"You got it," he agreed.

Just as they turned back to the hoard, the clearing behind the walkers lit up into a fiery ball with the sound of an explosion in the background, turning the somewhat clear corpses before them into backlit silhouettes, and many of the blackened figures were distracted by the orangey glow in the sky.

Ace straightened up, staring at the pond which seemingly just blew up, an obvious distraction to get the herd in one place and kill it at the same time—she was surprised she didn't have that idea themself, but lighting up the pond? The flames came up over the trees.

She didn't realise that everyone had stopped to look at the fire, marvelling at who could have made it happen when Rick yelled out, "Don't let up!"

They went back to killing the walkers who didn't notice the fire, the ones too close to them to consider turning around for the same distraction that the others had fallen for. It didn't matter, it had thinned out the corpses enough for them to make an actual dent in the group.

Ace made some more room between her and the others, allowing herself space to properly swing the axe around at the dead, making her faster and more precise. It was an all-out battle, barely twenty people against thousands, desperately trying to hold onto something that they had worked so hard for already.

Everyone was giving it their all, protecting themselves, and each other, just to make it one more night. She took a step back between the swings, regaining focus on how they grouped and moved, fighting in the way she was trained, moving just as Michonne was down the line of fighters.

Every walker that fell, every near miss and saved a life, they were sending a message to the new, broken world: Alexandria was theirs, and they would fight to their last breath to keep it.

There were a handful of walkers left to kill by the time the majority of them had wandered into the lake and burnt up, and the group was able to break free from the corner they had backed themselves into. But they were all dead.

Ace followed the group forward, to meet up with whoever had set the fire. Martinez clapped a hand on her shoulder as she passed him, just a way of saying he was glad to see her without actually coming out with it. When they came across the pond, there were more people in the middle of killing the last few walkers. Isaac, Maggie, Enid, Abraham, Sasha, Daryl and—

"Glenn!"

Ace sprinted forward, crashing into Glenn and burying her face in his shoulder. He was alive—they all were, the ones she cared about the most, the ones they lost contact with when the herd came to Alexandria. They were alive, and they were all standing right in front of her.

"I knew you were okay," she mumbled.

She believed it more when she saw the balloons in the sky, but that feeling of hope was quickly crushed when the building almost came down on her. She hadn't thought about any of them since, because she was focused on getting everyone inside of the house out alive, and she failed at that too.

Glenn didn't say anything at first, pressing a kiss to the top of her head as his arms wrapped more tightly around her. "You're not hurt are you."

Not me, her mind cut in, reminding her that Carl was still in the infirmary with a gunshot wound in his eye. Tears threatened to fall, and she pressed the heel of her palm into her eye to stop herself. "No, but . . . Carl got shot. I—I don't know if he's going to—" she choked off with a sob.

"It's alright," he shushed her, pulling her back into the hug.

Nobody tried to clear the streets when it was over. Even Ace, who didn't want to sit in the infirmary and wait for the terrible news, was inside kees up on one of the tables, her head in her hands. Everyone crowded outside with Martinez watching the direction of the fallen fence to make sure walkers didn't sneak up on them.

Daryl and Maggie were getting fixed up in the infirmary, too, and a few people were hanging around inside. Isaac sat beside her, arm to arm. She didn't blame him for not sitting closer, being there was probably hard enough for him since he'd seen her wearing the walker guts, let alone the fact that she was covered in dust and dirt from when the tower fell.

After a few hours, Denise let Rick into the room with Carl, saying that his heart was still beating and the bullet didn't penetrate that deep, but she did what she could to help him. She said it would be a painful road for him if he woke up, so she was getting morphine and pain medication ready.

"I'm gonna get some water, okay?" Isaac said, placing a hand on her shoulder as she stood up. "Want any?"

"No."

Isaac didn't seem convinced. "I'll get some for you anyway."

She just nodded as he walked away. She rean't thirsty, being so worried about Carl she didn't think she could eat or drink anything, but she let him do it anyway. Maybe he needed to feel like he was helping to distract himself.

She wasn't sitting by herself for long before Daryl came over and took the spot where Isaac had just been on the table. Daryl had always been in the room, getting his back fixed from a fight he had on the road with Abraham and Sasha—their trip didn't go that great either, apparently. Ace hadn't spoken to him since they came back, but they had a new truck and some very cool weapons.

"Good to see you're okay," Daryl said, planting a hand on her shoulder. "Last I heard, you and Rick were getting attacked."

"It's not me you should be worried about," she mumbled.

"He's gonna be just fine, alright?"

Ace puffed out her cheeks to argue, but she remembered all the people around them inside and out who were praying that Carl was going to be okay. She should have been the same, she should have been hopeful that her brother would live, but she couldn't muster the courage.

It would hurt too much if she was wrong.

"He was shot in the eye," she tried to stress, her voice a whisper.

"He's got a pulse," Daryl reminded her. "Denise said the bullet didn't go all that deep so it didn't hit his brain. He's gonna be okay. He's gonna need you to teach him to shoot again, huh?"

Still, Ace was shaking her head, denying the statement until she knew for sure that Carl was going to wake up. She didn't want to think about those ramifications on his sight and depth perception until she knew for sure that he was going to wake up.

"Go sit with him," Daryl nodded. "He's gonna want you there when he wakes up."

She reluctantly agreed, because if she went to see Carl, then it would give her an excuse to leave afterwards. Ace came to stand by the door with Michonne who held the baby, not looking her in the eye because Michonne had tried coaxing her to come and see Carl already and she'd denied it many times at this point. Nothing was going to change, and she wasn't going to stay long.

Rick was talking to him quietly when she peeked in, and there was a long moment of silence as he finished what he was saying. He looked just as devastated as she felt, and Ace considered turning away there and then when she saw Rick's head hanging low.

But then something else happened. Rick straightened up, and Ace saw the faintest movement in Carl's fingers as he squeezed his dad's hand. Ace stared in through the door, finally hopeful that everything was going to be okay.

Thank God, this stupid half of the season is over. I hope you enjoyed, but I know how boring these herd episodes could be despite there being thousands of walkers for it to end with the group just axing them down.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed and lmk what you thought :)