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Guest- Thank you so much! Something about Enid just gets people to say things... maybe she's magic? What Carl said will be explored next chapter, though! Let me know if you like how it plays out :)
hannahsanna- Gahhh... I promise that they will find their way back together! Stronger than ever!
-Rhys' POV-
Staying up gardening seems to have taken a toll on Maggie because not 20 minutes into the drive, she's fast asleep. Passed out against Glenn's shoulder.
Besides them and myself, five others signed up for the first contact mission. Mikey's sitting beside me, looking excited as he watches trees pass in the window behind our heads. This is the furthest he's been from Alexandria since the outbreak, our patrols only spanning a few miles. Daryl's been keeping his eyes on Mikey for a while now, seemingly less okay with him coming than Michonne, who is perched in the front passenger seat, sword leant against her knee, Rick's hand resting a little higher on her leg as he drives. I guess Carl was right about them. Finally, Abraham is sat on my other side, making me feel uncomfortable when he leans over to Glenn and starts talking about pouring Bisquick and making pancakes.
I turn to Jesus, who's been quiet for a while now.
"What's it called?" I ask sheepishly, feeling like someone will tell me off for speaking to him.
No one does.
"What?" Jesus looks up at me from his twiddling gloved thumbs.
"This place- your home. What's it called?"
He gives off a fleeting chuckle at the question, earning a frown from me in return.
"Sorry," he holds up his hands earnestly, "it's just... no one I've met has ever asked before I've said. Suppose I'm getting rusty."
"Well?" I shrug.
"Hilltop," Jesus tells me with an optimistic smile. "It's called The Hilltop."
Mikey leans an arm on my shoulder, talking loudly over me with his own question. "Is it on a huge hill?"
Jesus squints into space for a minute, like he's trying to picture it. "No," he finally shakes his head. "It's on a hill, but I wouldn't say it's huge."
"Dope," Mikey grins anyway.
"You're yelling in my good ear," I tell Mikey, pushing his resting arm off my shoulder.
"Wasn't yelling," he looks at me funny.
"Why are you so excited about this?" I ask Mikey. "Why'd you wanna come?"
"Don't you see," he asks, his face electric with positivity. "This is everything my Mom wanted for Alexandria... friends, trade, community."
"Yeah, I guess it is."
"Sorry for your loss," Jesus says to Mikey, clearly not having missed Mikey's use of the past tense. Jesus strikes me as a man that doesn't miss much.
Mikey thanks him, then shifts back to me, lowering his voice so only I can hear.
"Why are you still wearing Ron's watch?" Mikey asks, pointing to my wrist.
I thumb at its glass front, a couple of scratches on the surface. "Why are you asking?"
"He hated everything about your group. He tried to murder Carl. He took his eye." Mikey shrugs, looking sombre. "He's the reason you two are broken up... I mean... the way you are... since you're not actually broken up."
I don't say anything. Not enjoying the conversation.
Luckily we're interrupted. The RV starts to slow. The breaks are squeaking and Daryl's asking what's going on as he peers through the blinds by his head.
"We've got a crash ahead," Rick calls back. "Looks like it just happened."
We all squeeze together to look out the windscreen at the same time. There's a flipped car on a patch of grass by the side of the road. A few walkers are crushed beneath it, hissing and reaching for the RV.
I feel Jesus' shoulder jolt against mine as he says, "That's one of ours." He's out of the RV before it even comes to a stop, with his trench coat flapping behind him.
All of us scramble after him.
Jesus stops by the car and inspects the smoking wreck, checking the faces of the dead.
Rick clicks down the hammer of his revolver, pointing it at the back of Jesus' head.
Jesus spins to face us.
"If this is a trick," Rick growls, "it won't end well for you."
"My people are in trouble," Jesus looks past Rick's threat, glancing around for signs of life in a nearby building. "We don't have a lot of fighters. I know how it looks, but I'll play it out... can I borrow a gun?"
"Nah," Daryl shakes his head, pointing to a patch of disturbed leaves on the floor. "We got tracks right here."
Rick nods, turning to me. "Stay here, son. Keep the RV safe and watch out for him." He gestures to Mikey.
"On it," I nod, clutching my gun tightly.
"And Rhys," Rick says, "if this Jesus guy comes back here without any of us... no matter what, you put him down."
"Yes, sir," I nod again, feeling a little dizzy.
Everyone leaves with Jesus, following Daryl as he pursues tracks around the corner of a nearby office building, leaving us with nothing but the growls of the trapped walkers. I frown at them as they reach helplessly for us from under the flipped car.
"Can you get that one?" I point to the one on its back with its whole face burnt off. Its skin is peeled and singes run up and down its grabbing arms.
Mikey nods, drawing his knife.
The other, a woman missing half her jaw, starts hissing at me. I slam Ty's hammer into her face and she goes still.
Mikey's still standing there, staring at his walker.
"You okay?" I ask him.
"Yeah," he nods. "Why kill him? I mean, he's trapped."
"Peace of mind," I tell him, bringing my hammer down on the charred face.
Mikey looks away. When I'm done, he says something. "You never told me why..."
"Huh?"
"Why do you keep that?" Mikey points at Ron's watch again.
"Oh, right," I say, forgetting that he'd asked as I twist my wrist to glance at it. "I guess it's useful. Reminds me why Ron died. Reminds me why he was wrong about what he said... why some of it was right."
"But-" Mikey stutters, looking away sad, coming back bitter. "Isn't it painful?"
"I suppose... but that's what makes it useful."
Mikey's eyes flicker between mine as he looks like he might say something, but he decides to just look away.
Rick and the others are back a few minutes later. Four new people are with them. None of them looks particularly threatening.
"It checked out?" I ask Maggie. "Jesus wasn't lying?"
"Looks that way," she nods.
We get back on the road.
One of the four we saved introduces himself as Harlen Carson. A tall lanky man, with floppy brown hair and a scruffy five o'clock shadow. He tells Glenn and Maggie that he was an obstetrician before the outbreak when they bring up prenatal vitamins.
Mikey leans over to me and whispers, "That means he's a baby doctor."
"Yeah, I know that, dickhead," I laugh, elbowing him in the ribs.
The other three seem nice enough. Bertie, Freddie, and Wesley. All three of them are apparent runners for the Hilltop. Freddie, a sweaty guy that won't stop looking terrified, keeps talking about how Abraham nearly choked him to death back there, saying that when he thought it was all over, he saw his wife clear as day.
As we draw closer in the rickety RV, I can't help but have flashbacks to when we first met Aaron. How he took us in this same vehicle to Alexandria. I make a small prayer that this trip can be as fruitful.
I hear the sound of spinning tires and mud splattering up the sides of the RV.
"Damn it," Rick pounds his hand against the wheel. "A storm must have passed through. We're stuck."
"No worries," Jesus pats his arm and points out the window. "We're here."
My feet sink into a foot of mud when I step out the door. Glenn grabs me when I slip, saving me from the need for an embarrassing shower as he pulls me away from the mud patch we got stuck in.
Everyone is gawking at something.
I look up and follow everyone else's gaze.
I see high posts of timber standing tall atop a hill, a medieval wall before us.
"That's us," Jesus says, hopping out the door and over the mud, taking a few heavy steps in the direction of the wall. "That's the Hilltop."
"Erm," Michonne snickers behind her hand, looking at my feet. "You're missing a shoe."
"What?" I glance down and see my toes wiggling at me from my luminous yellow sock, shoe missing. "Fuck."
"Don't cuss," Maggie bumps my shoulder as she passes me.
"My shoe," I whine, pointing to the mud where my trainer is slowly being eaten by the earth.
"Oh..." Maggie stares at it for a second. Then, she and Michonne are laughing at me. Abraham and Mikey join in.
"Oh yeah," I grimace at them all. "Real funny."
Everyone stands and watches as Glenn retrieves my shoe to save my sock from stepping in the mud, too. When he hands it to me on the end of his finger, it's no longer red, and it's dripping clumps of wet mud.
"C'mon," Rick nods towards the Hilltop.
I realise the inside of my shoe is also drowned with mud. I realise that I'm gonna have to rock the 'one shoe one sock' look for the rest of the day, carrying my shoe with me.
"I really was expecting more of a hill," Mikey tells me as we all march up a dirt road towards two heavy gates, me, holding my shoe in my hand and avoiding stepping on rocks. We reach the gates, metal sheets bolted onto their wooden frame for extra protection.
I don't get a chance to answer Mikey before two guards on the wall yell down at us.
"Stop right there!" a young Asian guy roars.
"You gonna make us?" Daryl shouts back, pointing a shotgun up at him. Everyone on our side is now pointing guns, the guards only holding spears. I notice Mikey has his gun clutched at his side, only raising it when I bump his shoulder.
"Woah!" Jesus intercedes the violence, doing his best to live up to his nickname. "Open the gates, Kal," he calls up to the guy that told us to halt. "Freddie's hurt."
The doctor vouches for us, the others too. Rick and Jesus go back and forth for a bit, arguing whether we should go any further or not. Rick wants their leader to come out here. But Jesus wins the debate, asking Rick for some trust in return for how much he's given us.
"I trust you," Jesus tells Rick. "Trust us."
Rick takes a second before waving his hand above his head. I holster my handgun, nudging Mikey again to tell him he can too. His attention is preoccupied with those heavy gates. They're starting to creeks open, and I wince as it reminds me of the barn.
Rick leads the others through. I stop before the threshold, scared of going in for some reason. Maybe the air will be poisonous, or the floor trapped with spikes. Maybe I just shouldn't have decided that running away from home was a good idea today.
Jesus' hand finds my shoulder, squeezing softly. "Coming?"
I blow air through my cheeks and nod, following him in. No poison air and no spikes. Just the sound of those tall gates swinging shut behind me.
Inside is bare. Not bare in the way that feels empty, but more in the way that feels simple. Rustic and scrappy. New, yet somehow forgotten. A blacksmith is working at his forge, hammering away at tempered steel as a roaring fire silhouettes him. An orange glow from the metal he hammers lights his wrinkled face as sparks fly under the roof of a makeshift shack. No walls, just four beams holding up a rusted tin roof.
A lady leads a cow across our path. The floor consists of trodden down grass and scattered woodchips. She takes the cow towards a pen to our right. Two more cows are already inside it, chickens running around their feet as a man is desperately trying to catch them. An open stable past that holds a few sturdy-looking horses inside, one being led around a sand school that's connected. There's a farm too, crops growing tall and healthy just like Jesus had told us.
They have trailers with solar panels. I count six. A lady with light ginger hair leaves one, a wicker basket of washed clothes in her arms. She drops it when she sees us, Bertie breaking away from us to embrace her.
Jesus leads us to what is clearly the reason they built this place. A towering brick house stands outlandish against the rest of the community. Big enough to fit everyone I've seen here inside its belly, everyone in Alexandria too. I get lost trying to count all the white painted windows on the front of the building alone, losing my place around number seventeen. Above the front doors, it has a balcony larger than our porch back home that overlooks the rest of Hilltop.
"That's called Barrington house," Jesus points to it when he sees our awed faces. "The family that owned it gave it to the state in the thirties... the state turned it into a living history museum." He holds up his hands to add some flair. "Every elementary school for fifty miles used to come here for field trips. The place was running a long time before the modern world built up around it. I think people came here because they figured it'd keep running after the modern world broke down."
With the exception of an intrigued Mikey, I think we all hope he's done with the history lesson. But Jesus points up to the roof where a turreted spiral of windows sits, a wood spire on its peak. "Those windows up there let us see for miles in every direction. Perfect for security."
When Jesus leads our group inside, the house only getting grander. An entry parlour with an ornate rug splayed across its wood-panelled floors greets us. A spiralling staircase twists its way along the wall to the upstairs, a golden chandelier hanging in its centre. This place seems untouched.
Abraham puts it best as he stares at it all.
"Good gracious, Ignatius..."
Jesus continues his lesson about how most of the rooms are now living spaces, but then a pair of decorated double doors to my side opens. A man wearing a neat grey suit steps out dramatically.
"Jesus!" The suit exclaims. "You're back..." He looks to the rest of us, displaying his receding hairline and neatly trimmed grey beard. He raises his eyebrows at us like you might at a dog that just took a shit on your front lawn. "...with guests."
"Everyone, this is Gregory." Jesus sighs. "He keeps the trains running on time around here."
"I'm the boss." Gregory extends his arms wide, suspender showing beneath his pressed jacket.
Rick steps forward, AK-47 cradled in his arms. "I'm Rick, we have a community-"
"Why don't y'all go get cleaned up, hmm?" Gregory ignores him, looking instead at me, my bright yellow sock, and the muddy shoe I'm still holding. He points to the stairs.
"We're fine," Rick says through gritted teeth.
Gregory ignores Rick again. "Jesus will show you where you can get washed up. Then come back down here when you're ready." He steps forward, inches from Rick's face and breathing down his neck. "Hard to keep this place clean."
Rick pulls back, nodding. "Yeah. Sure."
As we all head up the stair, Rick leans to Maggie and says, "You clean up first. You talk to him."
"Why?" She squints back at him.
"I shouldn't," Rick sighs, cracking his neck. Probably also considering snapping Gregory's. "And you gotta start doing these things."
We wash up and wait outside Gregory's office in the atrium while Maggie speaks to him in private. The room smells of dust and old people. I sit in a comfy floral patterned armchair with my shoe in my lap, the mud has crusted into clumps now, so I start picking at.
When Maggie finally comes out of the room, her face doesn't look hopeful.
"How did it go?" Glenn asks her, standing to the side of the front door.
"Kept callin' me Natalie and doesn't think we have shit to trade."
Michonne and Daryl both make the same hmmph sound, obviously unsurprised by the way it played out. Abraham pulls away from the wall he's been leaning against, picking up his rifle like he's getting ready. Rick sits on the arm of my chair, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. Mikey, who's perched on the sofa across from me, lets his face fall a little bit, clearly not as ready for things to go wrong. I just sink into my chair, leaning toward the free arm. I guess this is the part where we consider killing everyone over a couple of cows.
"We want to generate trade," Jesus tells us, seeing the tension fill the room. "Gregory does. But ammo isn't something we urgently need."
"Well, how's that?" Rick stands, my chair jolting somewhat.
"The walls hold." Jesus gestures to the window and timber beyond. "We just brought in more medicine. Gregory wants the best deal possible."
I shake my head.
Don't these people realise we could take everything? If we were the wolves, we would. If we were those people that Daryl, Abraham, and Sasha met on the road a few months back, we would. If we were anyone but who we are... we could take it all.
"Yeah, well, we want things, too," Daryl snarls at him.
Rick nods. "We need food."
Then Rick says something that makes me wonder who we are.
"We came all this way... we're gonna get it."
"I will talk to Gregory," Jesus says calmly. "We will work this out. Circumstances change. We're doing well now, and you will next... I will make him understand that. Can you give me a few days?"
"We can," Michonne speaks from the corner of the room, settled in a chair by a decorative candelabra. She's been quiet for a while.
Rick glances at her. "Yeah."
The front door opens, and one of the people we rescued, Wesley, bursts in. Gregory comes out from his office at the same time, asking what's wrong.
"They're back," Wesley pants. "Ethan and the others."
Gregory gives a troubled nod to Jesus before they follow Wesley out.
The rest of us follow them.
Mikey catches my arm, asking for a minute.
When the others are outside, he speaks to me.
"How do you do it?" he asks.
"Do what?" I frown.
"Make the pain useful... you said that's why you wear the watch, right? But how do you actually make the pain useful?"
"I don't really know..."
He looks away again. "That's what my Mom said to me before we left her... before she turned."
"The Latin?"
Mikey nods. "She told me... Someday, this pain will be useful to you."
I remember her saying that. I always meant to ask him about it. Guess I forgot.
Mikey shakes his head. "I still can't do it. I felt pain when I lost her... when I lost my dad and my brother, too. I felt it again when Ron died. I felt it when I put Mom down." He stares at me with wide and scared eyes. "I keep feeling the pain, but I can't make it useful. It just hurts, Rhys."
There's a piercing scream from outside before I can answer. Mikey and I run out to find the source. A giant bearded man is pinning Rick to the floor outside, holding a knife to his throat and screaming.
"Stay back! Anybody who tries to stop me is killing my brother!"
I point my gun at him. Mikey does too.
Michonne tells him to drop the knife, her hand reaching for her sword.
But the man dies. The moment he looks up at Michonne, Rick punches a blade into his neck. The man buckles and Rick shoves him aside. The guy crumples to the woodchipped floor, blood oozing into his beard as he clutches at his throat.
Rick rises, his own five o'clock shadow smeared with the man's blood. He looks around. Everyone from the Hilltop is watching, horrified.
"What?" Rick shrugs his shoulders, an apathetic look under all the blood.
Mikey and I missed a lot in the short time we stayed behind. Gregory was stabbed by the man that Rick killed. His name was Ethan, he lived here and he was sent to kill Gregory. Apparently, the Hilltop owes another group supplies, but they were light on delivery.
We're all inside Gregory's office now. There's a heavy-looking desk made from smooth oak wood, ornate gold running up its legs. The bookshelf walls are stacked high with hardbacks that look like they smell of dust. A fireplace sits between a cabriole sofa and two chairs, with a painting of some important looking general dude sitting on a horse hanging above it.
Jesus comes in with blood on his hands.
"Doctor Carson was able to patch Gregory up," Jesus tells us. "He's in pain, but he'll live."
Jesus looks at us all, one at a time, gauging our reactions. He sees us all except for Maggie, who's been staring out the window for a little while now.
"So, what happens now?" Michonne asks from her seat on the sofa.
"Things like that don't usually happen here, but, uh... it's settled." Jesus hangs his head.
"We heard the name Negan out there." Rick stands from where he'd been leaning against Gregory's desk.
The name makes me feel strange. Like I've heard it before. Mikey frowns out of familiarity as well.
Rick goes on. "A while back, Daryl and Abraham had a run-in with his men. Who is he?"
Mikey and I both make the same 'Ah, that's right' gasp, remembering that it was those men that attacked them on the road before the horde was destroyed. The ones that Daryl apparently used the new rocket launcher in the armoury to blow up.
"Negan's the head of a group of people he calls the Saviors," Jesus explains, folding his arms tightly and looking pissed off. "As soon as the walls were built, the Saviors showed up. They met with Gregory on behalf of their boss. Made a lot of demands... even more threats." Jesus stops, looking at me and Mikey. I think he might be done, but he lets out a heavy breath before saying, "And he killed one of us... Rory. He was sixteen years old."
I catch Maggie and Glenn looking at me, too. Feeling self-conscious, I place my palm over the soft bandage covering my missing ear.
"They beat him to death right in front of us," Jesus tells us. His playful way of speaking is gone. He looks trapped somewhere between enraged and heartbroken. "Said we needed to understand, right off the bat."
"Gregory made the deal?" Maggie asks.
Jesus nods. "Half of everything. Our supplies, our crops, our livestock, it goes to the Saviors... to Negan."
Every time he says the name, a shiver flies down my back. I lean against a bookcase, trying to hide it amongst the other spines.
Mikey asks a question. I've been watching him build the nerve to speak.
"What do you get in return?"
"They don't attack this place. They don't kill us." Jesus says it with a smirk, showing us that he knows it's bullshit.
"Why not just kill them?" Daryl raises the point we've all been wondering.
"Most of the people here don't even know how to fight, even if we had ammo. The guy that Rick killed out there left with a much bigger group than the two he came back with. Tim and Marsha... the Saviors killed them. They've taken someone else hostage... Craig."
"Well, how many people does Negan have?" Rick asks, checking the cylinder of his colt python, each click resonating off the booked walls.
"We don't know," Jesus tells it simply. "We've seen groups as big as twenty."
Daryl shakes his head, scratching his goatee and says, "Now, hold up. So, they show up, kill a kid, and you give them half of everything? These dicks just got a good story. The bogeyman, he ain't shit."
"Well, how do you know?" Jesus asks, still with his arms crossed, moving to the centre of the room and standing before the fireplace.
"A month ago, we took his guys out PDQ," Abraham tells him from the corner of the room, lounged in an armchair. "Left them in pieces and puddles."
"You know, we'll do it," Daryl tells Jesus. "If we go get your man back, kill Negan, take out his boys, will you hook us up? We want food, medicine, and one of them cows."
Jesus looks to Rick.
Rick shrugs. "Confrontation's never been something we've had trouble with."
Jesus looks at us all again, everyone looking back this time. All of us wait for his answer.
"I'll take it to Gregory," Jesus says.
Jesus did take it to Gregory, who wanted to speak to Maggie. By the time she comes back to us, a deal's been made. We get half of everything they have now if we take out the Saviors.
"Even Negan didn't get this much upfront," Jesus smirks at Mikey and me, walking past us as he carries a basket filled with potatoes to the RV. We're sitting on the edge of a vegetable garden. I needed to sit down after stepping on a pointy rock with my shoeless foot. We watch as everyone finishes loading up.
"I think it's a good thing that the pain's not useful to you."
Mikey looks up from a weed he's been pulling at when I say that.
I pull my shoulders in, giving a weird kind of shrug, feeling like I'm about to say something wrong.
"Pain didn't used to be useful to me. Before we got to Alexandria, after the prison, there was a time when it just hurt to lose someone... when you didn't have to get something out of it. I think it's good that you still have that."
Glenn comes out of the infirmary, waving me over. I leave Mikey to think about it.
The infirmary is inside a small sterile trailer that smells like disinfectant. Maggie's lying on a padded table. Glenn's holding her hand while Dr Carson uses a small probe against her bare stomach. There's a monitor that the three are looking at. It's a mess of grey lines and numbers, not much more than a blur. Carson points to an outline, something you could possibly describe as a human if you squint hard enough. So small and delicate that I'm not certain how it could be possible in this world. Only, it does exist, and I can hear a heartbeat.
A/N
For some reason, the last chapter's beginning got cut in half :/ So I've gone back and added it... it's just a little bit of Carl and Rhys dialogue.
Hope y'all enjoyed!
:)
Next Time: The Hilltop group returns to Alexandria, a storm settles in, and a decision must be made.