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The already set sun’s faint gleam was burning through the leaves while Clementine was treading on a forest trail alone. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since she left Richmond to find AJ. Despite her expectation of a fast and direct one, the journey proved itself to be very treacherous as the distant gunfire was yet again her only company. Wherever she turned, she kept meeting more conflict. Because of the constant fray, walkers appeared erratic too, making her destination more convoluted than it had to be. For weeks, maybe a month at this point, she kept running and running. Away from humans, from walkers, away from it all…
She just wanted AJ by her side.
“Stupid… shit…” Clementine muttered while trying to read her map of the area which was getting more illegible with every passing day. The road and occasional rain wore the piece of paper to its limit, and she had to avoid main roads as the war surrounding her was never too far away from them, leaving Clementine with no idea of where she actually was.
Unfortunately, today also proved to be over with little to no progress. Her body was maybe her arch enemy. Having to run on the rugged terrain of hills and forests for days on end because of walkers was starting to get unbearable as she felt her energy dissipated and her legs and feet were rebelling achingly.
It was getting dangerously darker every second as Clementine began wondering if she should concede for today. She didn’t want to, every day she gave up on was warding her off of AJ, she felt. However, she neither knew where exactly she should be headed, nor had the necessary visibility to keep treading safely. She stopped, after an irritated sigh, started looking for a suitable tree to spend the night on.
She climbed and did her best to get comfortable. Even though she knew she wouldn't be able to, at least not right away, she closed her eyes to get some proper rest. And as if on cue, the gunshots began ranging again. They sounded fairly far away, but it failed to relieve Clementine even one bit.
Who were fighting? Was Richmond involved? What about… the ranch… What if she was too late? What if the war she was enveloped in already struck where AJ is? What if…
As if her prevalent struggles were not enough, Clementine’s paranoiac thoughts were keeping her restless once more. Her mind and will were screaming at her to get on her feet, but every bone and muscle in her body were pleading her otherwise. At the end, Clementine managed to silence her concernful mind and have some shut-eye, noises of war accompanying her.
Her slumber ceased abruptly after some time, which Clementine felt wasn't long enough. The twilight’s newfound silence was being disturbed only by some clacking noises that woke her up. She assured her stance on the tree quietly and began looking around. The noise was getting louder as she pinpointed the source of it when she saw two horses trippling on the road she was just on.
Two oblivious riders - who seem armed, to Clementine’s best judgment - were passing by her tree. One of them was dismounted, his eyes scanning the ground in front of him while the other man’s eyes were checking their surroundings.
“Man, fuck this…” The one on the ground began. “...How the shit am I supposed to see in this?”
“You ever stop bitchin'?” The mounted man complained.
A horse… It would solve the majority of her problems, Clementine thought as she slowly skinned down the tree after the riders went past her and put some distance. She never properly rode one, but remembered the basics of it well from when they visited a ranch with her father, way back when. She also saw how Jesus and his mates fought walkers on horseback in Richmond, fundamentals of using reins and stirrup she got accustomed with.
She caught up to them enough to hear some of their conversation again.
“...Gary’ll… out of… find them.”
“Why’d… dead anyways… waste…”
Clementine kept following and listening to the riders. The horses were one thing, they most likely also had food, ammo, information and maybe even a better map too… Everything that would make finding AJ faster and safer. She obviously couldn’t ask them. For all she knew, they were cutthroats who would shoot her on sight before uttering a single word, fitting to how unwelcoming the region was. She couldn't take the chance.
Clementine sneaked closer to hear the riders better, in hopes for them to not be utterly evil. She sought to know more about them before engaging in accordance.
"--be done."
"Who the hell saw'em, anyways?"
"Gary himself."
"Of course! What is he, a hawk or sumthin'?!"
"You know what? Just fuck off and return to him empty-handed. Spare me this headache."
"Hell no, man… Freak'd probably eat me alive!"
"Then shut it and keep looking."
This was nowhere good, Clementine thought. The way they talked and what they were doing right now implicated nothing but malice. They were tracking something, and Clementine highly doubted that it was a game.
"Just why us, man? We could be feasting now."
"Noone's feasting, dumbass… Not yet."
"Hell, why were you so eager?"
"Not too keen on burnin' corpses."
"It’s way better than looking at dirt'n shit in pitch fucking black."
“Gotta get done.”
Clementine winced upon what she was hearing and warily pulled out her pistol and checked the magazine. Three bullets…
"Dammit…" she quietly muttered and chambered one in. The gun in her hands, she exhaled lengthily to brace for whatever comes next. The moon helped, but it was still quite dark and a better opportunity to engage them might yet show itself. A distraction of some walkers at worst, Clementine hoped.
“Didn’t take you for the responsible type…”
"I have my own funs."
"..."
"..."
"…Hey, you won't see me judgin'. I get it."
"As long as they're dea–"
"Hold up!.."
Clementine stopped with the riders as the one on the ground kneeled down.
"...Way too out in the open and clean. They passed through here."
"I kne–"
Suddenly a couple of faint gunshot noises from afar reached them through the forest.
"Has to be them, right?"
"It sure ain't us… Hop back on."
The man mounted his horse and both of them bustled their horses in an instant. Clementine sprinted after them a bit, first to check what they saw on the ground.
It was a lidded pendant with a couple's portraits inside, which also had a ring attached to its snapped chain…
"...Shit."
Clementine kept running and tracking the horse prints as best as she could while the dawn was on its way. A small junkyard began showing on the verge of the forest's brief end. She slowed down behind a tree as she saw the horses tied at its entrance. She could hear them grumble while Clementine caught her breath.
Her first thought was searching for any satchels, but she noticed they were wearing none as she got near them. From what Clementine could see out of the crevices, the junkyard looked to have an office-like building in the middle of it.
Her eyes were back at one of the tense horses. She sheathed her pistol and laid her hands on the horse's neck to try calming her down while she pondered on her options.
She could just take one of them and leave right now, putting tons of distance in between before they could see her. But what then, she thought. Horse’d take her feet off the ground, sure but she still had no idea where she actually was. Plus, leaving a horse behind while snatching the other away felt like a recipe for disaster, especially since these men seemed skilled at tracking.
On that thought, Clementine heard a gut-wrenching yowl of a woman coming from the direction of that office, which stopped abruptly. Clementine gritted her teeth while the horses recoiled and began fidgeting. After calming the one she was holding onto, Clementine made her decision. If these scumbags were the cause of all this war, she had to know if they got to McCarroll Ranch. Either from them, or the people they were hunting.
She had to know…
She brought her pistol up again and released the stressed horse, slapping its back for it to run wildly into the forest. On the off chance that she needed to escape, she had to make sure no one could chase her with another horse, Clementine thought as she entered the junkyard. She sneaked forward on the trail made by all the trash around it. She saw one of them in front of the building, looking at his surroundings with a pistol in his hands.
“What happened to ‘do and be done with it’, man?” He said towards the building's high open door, on top of a couple of stairs. Clementine heard an incomprehensible response coming from the building, which the man visibly got frustrated by as he continued his watch.
This was it, her position was not going to get any more perfect than this. She had clear sight over both the hunter outside and the building’s entrance. She aimed her pistol, ceased her exhale in half and pulled the trigger. The hunter collapsed by the headshot, dying long before he even hit the ground. The loud bang echoed for some time while Clementine waited for the other one to come forth as well. She kept hearing the man inside say some things even after the gunshot, like he was unphased.
Clementine got flustered for a second, thinking that the man might’ve gotten out by another exit. She quickly ran at the building's wall, right beside the door frame and listened. She heard him inside, rattling around.
“Fucking fuckwit…” The man yelled from inside. “...Can’t you take even a deadie out without your gun?!”
Clementine heard his footsteps come closer.
“Darwin…” He called out right as he was on the front door “...I swear, you gotto b–”
His eyes did not take long to lock onto the dead hunter. After a split second in which he barely got a hold of his own gun, a couple of bullets punctured his torso as he collapsed screaming inside the doorframe.
Clementine immediately got on top of him after kicking the pistol he was about to pull off down the stairs.
“Who are you people?...” Clementine snarled at the painfully wheezing man, still holding him at gunpoint. His eyes glared down at her, but his body was feeble beyond any doubt as he couldn’t utter a single word out.
“...Have you attacked McCarroll Ranch?!” Clementine kept yelling, but life slowly left the man’s eyes in front of her, accompanied by his last wheeze.
“Fucking… SHIT!” Clementine madly shouted and kicked the corpse down the stairs. Albeit it being the correct way to deal with a human threat, she didn’t want to kill him right away but she panicked and double-tapped. She maybe could’ve gotten something out of him if she didn’t.
During her frustration, the moment she was about to get inside the building to check if anyone survived, she started hearing a sprinting noise slowly getting louder.
“Third one?!” Clementine’s immediate thought was as she rushed inside the small building and got into the farthest room. The scenery she encountered within churned her stomach and recoiled her for a second. A butchered corpse of a woman, her body all mangled up and her… Ughh…
Clementine could not bear the sight any longer as she winced and took her eyes away. She saw a window that led outside while the footsteps were in front of the building now.
“Ma– Maria?!” Clementine heard the man call out as she jumped off the window. She was defenseless without any bullets and whoever this man was, he’d not take her presence there well, she impulsively thought. She began running, took another route to the junkyard’s entrance. As she was on top of the horse, right before she stirred her up she heard the man’s deafening wail, so loud as if he was right beside her.
Clementine was the one that had a horse trippling the forest path now as the sun was completely out. Despite the somewhat lucrative morning, she couldn’t ignore its horrors either as her eyes were down on the ground, contemplating.
She was no stranger to death, or even killing at this point. In her eyes, those bastards deserved even worse. However, Clementine couldn’t get the third man out of her mind. Was he with them? How did she not notice him before, then?! No, he couldn’t be… Or…
Everything happened so instantaneously that Clementine couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed at the moment. All she knew after she killed the second man was the fact that she had no bullets left, and no information either. Her instincts practically forced her to flee the scene after she had heard the third one. There was no telling how it would wind up if she stayed there, right on top of the inexpressibly horrendous scenery of that woman.
Clementine sighed, she still had no idea where she should be headed. She reached for the small map in her jacket’s pocket, but she felt an unfamiliar object within.
“The pendant…”
Clementine forgot she picked it up. She opened its lid again.
“...that’s… her.”
She recognized the woman. As brief as her glance was, she could not get rid of the imagery of her corpse, her open… shocked eyes…
“Maria…” she whispered, finally making sense of what that third man said as she softly pulled on the reins with her other hand to stop the horse. He must’ve been her spouse. A wave of distress swept through her mind while thinking about that man, if a complete stranger like herself was so disturbed by what she saw…
Pendant in her hand, Clementine kept wondering. She checked her gun before turning the horse around:
“I gotta know.”
She arrived near the junkyard once more. She bound the horse at the same spot again and got a hold of her gun, headed for that building. The door was still open, both the hunters were in front of it. Clementine kneeled down to frisk them, but she noticed they had been searched already as both of them were lying not the way she left them.
He wasn’t here and undoubtedly armed well now. If she was to approach the grieving man, she–
Suddenly, she began hearing a sound of… what she assumed to be dirt dropping, coming from outside the junkyard. She began heading towards the noise by another entrance to the junkyard she didn’t pay attention to before, on the other side of the building. Out the fence, she saw a man kneeled down, working the ground. She snuck up on him, hoping he couldn’t hear her through all the noise he was making and raised her pistol.
“Drop the weapons...” Clementine ordered with a calm voice. The man had his back against her as he stopped and looked back to Clementine. The long and thin bearded, scrawny-looking man’s blue and dried-out eyes seemed to have no life within them. He was covered with so much dirt that she couldn’t tell how old he was, but there was no mistaking it. Even though the one on the pendant had no beard, this had to be the man in the portrait.
“...I don’t want to shoot you.” Clementine pleaded, her empty pistol still on him.
“Don’t point the gun, then.” The man said japingly in his hoarse voice and went back to his work. Clementine walked around to face him appropriately, keeping her distance. He was using a split shovel to bury a half-covered ditch in front of him, no need to guess why as she didn’t bother looking inside. Despite his appearance, there seemed to be serious power in each of his delves into the dirt.
Clementine’s face soured sympathetically to the man’s effort as she slowly lowered the weapon.
“Who were they?” Clementine asked, pointing towards the junkyard with her head.
“You kill every stranger you see, kid?” The man queried back coldly in between his task which surprised Clementine. He must’ve seen her escape the junkyard, she thought.
“I was near. I… heard her screams…” Clementine let out. She refrained from telling him how she tracked the riders for their horses, for the off chance of him not taking that lightly. But despite that, the man instantly stopped digging in response to look her in the eye.
She couldn’t completely tell from his bushy beard, but his shaking eyes indicated how furious he got upon hearing that. Clementine warily recoiled in response, thinking that maybe he caught her lie, but fortunately man’s gaze slowly fell back down to the grave. He just seemed to not appreciate his assumed wife’s last seconds as he began digging again.
“Did the other one suffer?” He asked again. Clementine gritted her teeth anxiously:
“Relatively.” she tried to amplify without outright lying, but the man grunted unpleasantly in response. She didn’t have to despise what she did, but she knew she couldn’t enjoy it either. However, what worried her more was the aim of his question, she didn’t necessarily want to know what he would’ve done to them.
The man seemed more than agitated, but she couldn’t leave yet. Counting on to the counterfeit threat she still held in her hands:
“...I, uh… gotta know who these people are. My–”
“Dead man all.” The grieving man cut her with a quiet snarl, like a hound as he continued filling the grave. His tense voice had the intention of a brutal vengeance written all over it, Clementine could tell. She feared to ask more about the scumbags to not irritate him further and decided to change her method. She reckoned she could use some sympathy to help both herself and the man as she was reminded.
“I… think this belongs to you?..” Clementine said as she pulled the pendant and the ring out of her pocket, presenting it to the man. His eyes flashed upon seeing the items and grabbed them both in a snap.
“...It was on the road.” She added, in fear of the man accusing her of looting. But he didn’t seem bothered as his eyes were starting to glimmer upon the sight of the pendant. He must’ve known she lost it, Clementine thought as silence endured. The man enclosed the items inside his fist and kept them near his chest. With shut eyes, he muttered:
“Did you… see her?”
“Just the end of it.” Clementine replied softly and reservedly. He winced upon the answer, undoubtedly reminiscing the scenery himself. He sniffled and wore the ring on top of his own, his hands subtly shaking. Nervous Clementine began explaining:
“...I thought you were with them too, so I legged it…” After a snicker aimed at herself, she presented the gun in her hands before sheathing it back and said:
“...Yeah, this’s empty.”
“Figured…” the man let out as he stuffed the pendant into his shirt’s pocket. The fact that he knew she was within the scene and not lunged at her immediately, and how broken but also collected he appeared now assured Clementine that he was causatively in no shape to be a real threat to her anymore.
The man thrusted the shovel back into the dirt, but paused. His eyes meeting hers for a second, he lowered them back to the grave as he muttered:
“...Thanks, kid.” and continued his task. Clementine nodded with a gentle smile in response.
“Were you…” She began, the weight of what she was about to ask dawning on her as she gulped before continuing: “...from McCarroll Ranch, by any chance?”
The man’s eyes were on her once more, but this time they seemed more composed, maybe even grateful.
“I knew the owners.” He said right before he continued burying the almost-filled grave.
“I’m told it’s a community now...” Clementine corrected. “...I need to get there… but I’m lost.” She admitted to the grieving man, now that he seemed a lot more approachable. He poured the last of the dirt and let go of the shovel, before sitting beside the grave completely.
“It’s far.” The man informed.
“I c–”
Her words got interrupted by the familiar growl of a walker. It was the hunter she killed, slowly approaching them with his undone belt swinging in front of his legs. Clementine rose up to the task, handling her knife. Just as she was about to walk past the man to get to it, she felt a harsh push which knocked her to the ground immediately. Her heart skipped a beat as the man was towering over her now, his fiery eyes and a pistol pointed at her. Clementine’s shock gradually shaded off into confusion as the man grabbed the shovel back and approached the closing-in walker himself.
A quick front kick knocked the walker down and he kicked him from the side to turn his back up. He tucked away the pistol and stepped on his neck, quickly followed up by his hold on one of the walker’s arms. The sickening noise of a broken joint followed as he kicked its elbow and completely tore the limb off with another one. The other arm met the same fate, before the man positioned the shovel over the walker’s cheek. Accompanied by a rageful shriek, a vertical kick upon the shovel’s metal wing tore the walker’s jaw off of its face.
The man drew a long breath and got off of the walker, looking morbidly satisfied. He turned back to the now standing Clementine who raised her arms up as he pointed the gun at her once again. In between his breaths, Clementine noticed his finger was outside the trigger ring as he growled:
“He rots.”
“He rots…” Clementine agreed after a brief silence, inwardly scared still. To her surprise, he let go of his tense face as he spun the gun around with a sudden twirl of his wrist, handing it over to her which she obliged. The silver colored pistol felt quite bigger and heavier than her own as she tucked it away.
The walker was on its feet, but somehow docile. Now that it had no instrument to deal any harm, it just waddled off, which puzzled Clementine.
“Who’s at this ranch?” The man asked as he was sitting beside the grave again, his eyes on the soil in front. His impulsiveness still worried Clementine, but it did not change the fact that he just handed over a loaded gun to her willingly. An understandably troubled man, dealing with it in his own way, Clementine thought and neverminded his sudden attack earlier as she replied:
“What’s left of my family.”
The half of his face Clementine could see had a subtle smile on it in response. His serene look at the grave persisted while he began:
“Head east from here…” Clementine wore a joyful grin as he continued. “...you’ll hit the 45. South of that leads you to James River. Follow it upstream, you can’t miss the ranch...”
She was lost for words and atwitter, struggling between getting a move on right ahead or not upon having this greatest lead she ever had since Richmond.
“...Find’em…” he added, now looking at her before giving her a chance to respond. His eyes reflected the sorrow he was absorbed by as he said: “...and get as far away as you can…” He turned back to the grave, his gaze tensing as he finished with his snarl: “...things’ll get worse.”
The last part sent chills down Clementine’s spine as it felt more like a grim promise than a mere assumption.
“Thank you, and… take care.” Clementine could only say, still fired up. The man just chuckled briefly and mumbled right before the girl got a move on:
“You too, kid.”
He was sitting down as he began hearing the receding noise of a horse sprinting away after some time. He took out the other pistol he had with him and the pendant from his pocket. He pressed the bead of the handgun hard on his forehead while peering at his wife’s portrait inside. He felt the sting, let it linger as he began tapping the trigger ring. Blood began seeping into his own portrait while his eyes crazed.
The pandemonium he was craving to bring upon them, more with each second he spent looking at her… How she was… How they left her…
Those wretched… oblivious… wicked souls…