Reviews:
valxra- I'm happy to hear you enjoyed it! I think wanting Rhys to leave is perfectly fine! Hell, even I'm super excited for more Carol interactions! It's definitely and totally frustrating, the Carl/Rhys/Enid thing, I hope in a gripping way, though! Something I've been keeping in mind when writing their relationship is that they don't have much to go off. They were both so young when the world ended. They don't have experienced friends to talk about it with, they just have each other, so things can get rocky when they're not on the same page. Not sure if that makes sense out of my head, aha. It was sad to make Rhys so outcast, I must admit! Thank you for the support, and I hope you enjoy these two recent updates!
Carol's still crying.
I'm not sure if it's even an act.
Maybe it never was.
Maybe Carol doesn't know the real her anymore.
Maybe that's something we have in common?
If so, then it's just another thing for me to hate.
The deep quiet that is left behind by the shots steals my breath. Jonny Cash is still playing faintly on the radio. The only other sounds are the gun hidden up Carol's sleeve as it clicks empty rounds and the leaking coming from our fuel tank.
I jump when the driver sits up in the pickup, firing his handgun at us as he stumbles out of the car. Carol flings herself behind our car, and I dive low into the seats, keeping flat as the windshield explodes and showers me with glass.
I can't breathe as I hear his heavy boots getting closer. I can't move. Glass shards sit like grit on the back of my neck. He sees me the second he reaches the window he just shot out. I twist around, begging him not to shoot me as he raises his gun. I hear scraping gravel behind me as Carol jumps up from the other side of the car, grabbing one of the car's spikes and shoving it through the broken window from her side, driving it deep into the man's chest. I scream and kick the door into him. He flies back to the asphalt, impaled and dead.
Carol moves around the car in a flash, taking his gun and pointing it at the pickup.
"I can see you," she says to the car. "Come out slowly."
I see a foot move behind one of the tires.
"Yeah, I think I'm gonna pass on that." I recognise the voice as Jiro's. He doesn't sound as smug now.
I get out, looking around for my gun, knowing I dropped it somewhere.
"Stay down," Carol hisses at me over her shoulder from beside the pickup.
Jiro lunges out at her while she's not looking, his knife up. Carol whips around and blows a smoking hole through his chest.
Jiro falls back hard to the concrete, clutching at his punctured torso and wheezing out blood coloured drool. Blood leaks from their car like the fuel from ours. A small red box of cigarettes fell from Jiro's pocket, so I snatch them up and put them in mine.
-Carl's POV-
"You didn't have to come," Morgan says out loud. Dad and I both look at him. I stay quiet, though— pretty sure he's not talking to me.
"We have to try," Dad pinches the bridge of his nose, watching me in the rearview, "even if it's a long shot, even if it's dangerous."
I break our eye contact, staring out the window and trying not to sulk.
"Rhys said east in his letter," Dad continues. "We go east."
Morgan keeps his eyes on the road, one arm on the wheel with the other in his lap. He speaks quietly. "Saviours compound that you and the group went to, that was west."
Dad and I both stare at him again.
"Seems like they went east," Morgan says.
"Rhys wouldn't do that," I blurt out before thinking. "He wouldn't just leave us."
"You don't even know them," Dad grumbles, shaking his head at Morgan.
"Oh, I got to," Morgan tells him. "A little."
Dad's staring out the window with glazed eyes, doing that thing I hate. He does it when he doesn't want to hear anything else. Only, right now, I feel that way too.
"Why are you doin' this?" he asks.
"What I believe..." Morgan stutters, "I'm— I'm not right. There is no right. There's just the wrong that doesn't pull you down."
Dad keeps staring out the window and into the space between spaces. "It hasn't pulled me down."
"I think it will," Morgan sighs, smoothly swerving the car around half a walker that claws at us from the middle of the road. A whole group of walkers is coming down the bank behind it, getting all excited as we drive by, losing interest once we're gone.
-Mikey-
Mikey has no idea why Rosita didn't have him thrown out of the van. After all, she knows what Daryl's doing and where he's going, just like Mikey does. But for some reason that Mikey can't figure, she didn't rat him out.
Paying along to the ruse, Rosita lets Mikey direct Glenn all the way to the train tracks.
It all looks the same to Mikey.
The same cars that Denise got the orange soda from.
The same barrels that Abraham and Rhys hid behind.
The tracks where they were held at gunpoint— where Denise's body had hit the ground.
Mikey is staring at the spot where it happened. Rosita is, too. A small stain of red on the gravel is all she's reduced to.
On the far side of the tracks, dead Saviors are still being consumed by walkers, most likely attracted by the gunfight. Michonne deals with the dead, two singing slices from her sword, and the tracks fall silent.
Glenn's looking at the bloodstain, too, now.
"That's where she died," Rosita tells him, not looking away from the stain.
Glenn nods, taking a moment of silence. Mikey can't tell if it's out of respect for them or Denise.
"All right," he finally says, "so Daryl had to start from here. You're both sure he's going after Dwight?"
"He is," Michonne calls from the edge of the woods, pointing to a motorcycle she's found hidden under leaves and branches.
Glenn dips his head, turning back to Rosita and Mikey. "Which way did Dwight run?"
Neither of them answers him. Both of them are still staring at that stain.
"Guys!" Glenn presses.
Rosita turns to look at him, sparing a quick glance at Mikey. "We should let him do this," she tells Glenn.
Mikey finally stops looking at the red, scratching his eyes. He's not crying, though. He's not sure what to feel.
"He doesn't know what he's doing," Glenn tells her, tilting his head a little, like he's confused about how she doesn't get that. "We don't. Maybe him trying this makes you feel better about it right now. Maybe they keep knowing more about us than we know about them." Glenn takes a step closer, his foot an inch from the red stain on the tracks, making Mikey gulp. "Or maybe Daryl's gonna get himself killed."
Rosita looks back at the floor.
"Which way did Dwight run?" Glenn repeats.
Mikey raises a finger towards the woodland where Daryl left his bike.
-Rhys' POV-
Carol and I walk for miles, through overgrown field after overgrown field, getting as far from the road and the dead Saviors as possible. I can't stop tripping in the long grass. Carol won't stop bleeding from a gash in her side. I think she got it when the car window exploded.
We find a small farm with a fence looping around the entire property. There is a house with its roof drooping from damp, and two barns sit rusted and rotting. Carol falls against a hay bale that's half-sunken in the mud. She clutches to it and breathes through her teeth.
"You good?" I ask hesitantly, not liking the need to take her and everything about her as really real— Preferring our relationship when we don't need each other.
Carol nods, pulling up her shirt to check her bleeding side. I look away while she does. There's a dead girl lying in the dirt with short grey hair that kinda looks like Carol a little bit. She's wearing a floral blouse, a few feet outside the fence, half-buried in the tall grass— her throat looks like it was cut open recently. I know she'll turn soon.
"We need to keep moving," I tell her. "We're not safe here."
I look back when she lowers her shirt, and she nods again.
"Is it bad?" I ask.
"Not great," she says, putting her hand over it, blood seeping into her shirt.
"Need me to stitch it?" I ask hesitantly.
"You care?" Carol asks.
"No," I say stubbornly, looking away and folding my arms.
Carol looks like words are brushing her lips, feelings that she can't quite make into words. "We don't have stitches anyway," she says.
The dead girl gets up, not alive, just up. She saunters down the hill we just climbed, away from us.
"Maybe we should go back," I say, my stomach dropping at the idea.
"No," Carol hisses.
"You need—"
"Go back," she tells me. "You don't even need to be here now. go back, go look for Tara, just go."
I look at her, realising that she didn't want me not to come because it's me, but because I'm someone.
"Why'd you tell that guy my name is Noah?" I ask.
"What?"
"Why did you tell that guy my—"
"I don't know," she hisses. "I didn't want to give them our real names."
"I just didn't think—" I hesitate.
"What?"
"Nothing."
Carol raises an eyebrow at me.
"Come on," I say, shaking my head, pointing past the farm. "Let's find some shelter."
-Carl's POV-
Cars are blocking the road ahead, a blue pickup parked sideways, past it, a car with spikes. Our missing car.
Morgan stops the car, and I jump out. Dad's telling me to hold up as he and Morgan climb out after me.
"That's their car," I point, walking towards it with my breath held for the bodies. There are four of them. None are Carol or Rhys'. I breathe out.
"You see 'em?" Dad asks, looking around.
"No," Morgan answers, grabbing a satchel bag from the car, and his stick, too.
I move to investigate, but Dad stops me, pointing to one of the bodies still moving, a young Asian guy, a gunshot in his chest. Dad kneels down, grabbing him by the shirt and lifting him until their eyes meet.
"Where are they?" Dad growls at him menacingly. The guy gurgles, red seeping from his lips. Then he dies, and dad lets him fall back to the floor, sticking a knife through his head.
I approach the car Carol and Rhys took from home, finding a gun behind one of its wheels. "This is Rhys' gun!" I tell them. "It's his beretta."
Dad grabs a spear that was lying in the truck's flatbed. "The Saviors were getting weapons like this from the Hilltop's blacksmith. These men were Saviors."
One of the Saviors has already turned, eating one of his former friends who has one of the car spikes through his chest. Morgan cracks his staff across the walker's head, the blunt trauma knocking it dead. He finds a piece of glass on the floor drenched in red.
"There's blood here," he points, "one of them could have been hit."
"I'm proud of them," Dad says.
Morgan and I both frown, looking around for a reason to feel pride.
"How's that?" Morgan asks, wiping the blood on his staff in the grass on the side of the road.
"Well, they took four of them down," Dad says.
I feel sick to my stomach.
"That woman," Dad says, looking around at the bodies, "she's a force of nature. And Rhys? He's a survivor," he looks at me, "more than most."
"Carol left because she can't anymore," Morgan tells him. "That's what her letter said."
"Can't what?" I ask. With everything that's happened, all the panicking and confusion, I haven't actually read Carol's letter.
"This," Morgan looks around at the crime scene that'll never be solved. "She couldn't kill anymore."
Dad disagrees. "She could because she had to." He stares Morgan down with cold eyes. "Sometimes you have to."
I catch Morgan staring at some blood on the floor. When I say his name, his head snaps back to us. He points to the blood.
"There's more blood opposite these men that leads into the field. It's a trail." Morgan nods at me. "Could be one of them. They could still be alive, because they're not here."
"Most of their guns are gone," my dad tells us, "they might have taken 'em."
"Why would Rhys leave his gun?" I hold it up.
"When we find him," Morgan smiles at me, "we'll ask him."
"Son," Dad wrinkles his nose and squints at me, "they might have died here... even if they're not here."
"They're alive," I say, grimacing at him.
"Only one way to know," Morgan says.
"Trail goes this way, right?" I start walking into the field. Dad and Morgan nod and follow.
"These Saviors were close to Alexandria," Dad squints uneasily. "There's even more of them. We didn't end it."
"No," Morgan tells him. "You started something."
A/N
Figured I'd release this chapter a little early since the last one was so delayed! Hope everyone enjoyed it! :)
Next Time: Carl, Rick, and Morgan stumble upon a stranger looking for his horse.