Chapter Text
Hope is a gentle buzz tonight, singing in the air in tune with the twisting dance of the camp fire flames that put on a show for carls group as they huddle around for warmth. All of them pleased with the days turnouts with a feeling of contentment that they had been lacking since the loss of the farm.
Eight months of never ending road, hunger, fear, and gritty survival way heavily on them all. Evident by the way the excited chatter never rises above a murmur, even now, surrounded by the freshly secured gates of the prison they’re set to make their own for the foreseeable future.
It would not be home, Carl decides. Despite the groups determination to carve out some semblance of what they knew at the farm. Carl will not sway on his resolve that this would not, could not, be his home.
Home is something belonging to the past, Carl understood this the moment he saw the bombs fall on Atlanta just over a year ago. Bombs dropped, he heard Shane say, by their own people. The death of civilisation was the death of simple luxuries like homes, beds, toys, grandparents, school, and to some extent, friends.
Friends, carl thinks, while not extinct are a precious commodity that has surpassed such a trivial term. If you have people you might consider as such, then they are family. And if they are not family, they are the enemy.
There can’t be a gray area inbetween. Carl understood that when he was forced to put a bullet through the man he grew up calling uncle Shane’s skull. The man his dad Insisted was his best friend, refused to see the warning signs that he was losing it, and took a knife in the gut for his troubles.
So no, this place would not be home. In a way, Carl pity’s the adults of the group. Pity’s them, because he imagines it must be harder for them to see the world for what it is. For them to let go of a lifetime in the world before, of years spent in school debating philosophy and morals and the perimeters of good and bad. Let go of decades spent following rules and relying on laws to save them from the truth of themselves and what they are. Animals.
Carl might have had 12 years and 11 months to live that life, but even with only being 14 now, he remembers very little if anything at all of his life before this one. His mom says it’s the trauma. His mom says a lot of things. Carl remembers hearing her whisper to his dad about him one night, about how she was scared they were losing him.
That was after Shane, in the months where he could barely look at his parents without blaming them for what had happened. He learnt to let it go eventually, because his mom was pregnant and needed him to be her little boy. So he could pretend for her and for the baby.
Pretend to remember the vague flashes of Sunday cartoons and complaining about school as if they belonged to him and not a stranger. As if he could remember what it felt like.
On the road, when raiding an old mall for supplies some four or five months after leaving the farm in ashes, his mum showed him a t-shirt with some unfamiliar characters on it and told him it was his favourite show.
Carl doesn’t know if it ever actually was, or if his mother simply wanted it to be, wanted him to have a favourite show. But he played along even if being seen in something so childish made his skin burn in humiliation. Because he loved his mom, and didn’t want to spend another night pretending not to hear her cry while rubbing her swollen belly.
She’s scared he knows, scared that she will lose the baby like she fears she is losing him.
***
She’s finally losing her mind. She must be, because she can’t stop hearing them. Voices. And whatever those things are beyond the barricaded cafeteria door, they don’t talk. Not anymore.
It feels monumental, the day someone loses their mind. Like a birthday. She wonders idly if she ought to mark it on the wall. But she gives up on that idea when remembering there would be no point in marking something without a date.
And she had lost track of that somewhere along the ten month mark, the stone she used to tally the walls long gone anyway, even if she wanted to give it a go.
She can’t remember exactly the day she stopped keeping track, but she thinks it might have been around the time she ran out of pots to piss in.
Yes, that was a sad day indeed.
But on the topic of loosing her mind, she wishes her brain would hurry up and get on with it. Because she’s pretty sure crazy people don’t feel bored, they’re too busy hallucinating some boogeyman and getting themselves killed.
But the voices are getting louder, and closer, so she supposes it can’t be long now.
She wonders what it will be in the end that does her in.
The obvious answer is dehydration, or it would have been, if she hadn’t discovered the leak in the roof the other month. Or maybe it was the other day. She can’t remember, but however long ago it was it’s been enough to stop her running completely out of water after she finished her last bottle.
So the next answer should be starvation, but it was a big prison, and she was just lucky enough to get trapped in the cafeteria that leads on to the enclosed kitchens. It’s lucky for her it seems that the U.S government deemed inmates, even the juvenile kind, undeserving of anything that doesn’t come from a can.
She remembers how they all used to complain. Canned meat that may as well have been rubber, canned chicken that could double as string, canned corn that you wouldn’t have been able to tell apart from the canned peas if it weren’t for the very slight yellow colouring. Canned vegetables supposedly of every variety though they could all be lumped in under green with no other discernible features. And to finish off canned fruit on Fridays for desert so long as you didn’t piss off whoever was in charge of serving the food.
Yes, she remembers how they complained.
Remembers how the guards would sneer when she reminded them she was vegetarian and they were legally required to give her enough non meat foods to accommodate that. Remembers how they would mutter about “special treatment.”
And she supposes the joke is on her in the end, because less than a week stuck in this god awful room and she was suddenly over her vegetarianism.
‘Hah fucking hah you dead bastards.’
****
Carl paces agitatedly as he waits for his dad, hershel, Glenn, Maggie, Daryl and T-dog to get back from clearing the next couple cell blocks.
He’s angry, no, he is furious that they wouldn’t let him help even after he has killed just as many walkers as Glenn has. And definitely more than T-dog has.
Not to mention they made him stay back in the courtyard with his mom, who is nine months pregnant and couldn’t help for obvious reasons, Carol, who only just started getting decent with a gun after the death of her piece of shit husband. And Beth, who’s only sixteen and still hasn’t killed a Walker.
They made him stay with them while they cleared cell block C, the one they currently have been dumped in and told to wait, like he’s just some useless kid that can’t handle himself.
They even let hershel help, despite him being ancient and the closest thing they have to a doctor. Who, if he were to get himself killed, would leave his mum with nobody to help deliver his sibling.
The idea makes him sick. The way they speak to him makes him sick.
It makes his body feel wrong when they treat him like a kid, like he’s deceiving them.
Or maybe they’re deceiving themselves, deceiving themselves the way adults so often do. Into thinking they have protected him from it all, that he somehow hasn’t seen the death and the things they have done. Or that he’s too young and stupid to understand it. That he didn’t know what it meant when his best friend walked out that barn with grey skin and grey eyes. Eyes that were the brightest blue once.
That he doesn’t feel the grief they do, the anger, the loss.
Because he’s just a kid.
***
The cafeteria doors burst open just as she was starting to doze. The bang wakes her body up before her eyes, her back hitting the furthest wall as she scurries away from the door.
She nearly screams, before catching it in her throat and slapping a hand over her mouth. For a brief round of disoriented seconds she thinks the things outside have finally broken past the barricaded doors, and her hand scramble for her knife.
But then the buzzing in her ears clears and the voices come back, this time in the room with her, and she sees a group of other people scrambling further into her space.
One of them, a bald dark skinned man, quickly forces the doors closed behind his friends, fighting against the things trying to push their way in.
The only woman in the group quickly pulls her flannel from her shoulders and ties it around the door handles, securing them long enough for the bald man to wheel a table infront of the door and lock it in place by clamping down on the tables breaks.
The rest of the group are screaming over each other, carrying an older bearded man between them and dumping him onto a table.
The bearded man himself is screaming the loudest, like a skinnier mall Santa who’s given up baths, with a bleeding leg spraying blood from what must be a punctured artery.
Beside him, a white man probably in his mid 30s slides his belt free from this waist and wraps it tightly around the Santa guys upper thigh. Mean while a young Asian man who can’t be older than 23 looks as if he’s about to be sick.
All of them seem too panicked to notice her watching them, but her element of surprise goes out the window when the man in his mid 30s whips out an axe and brings it down on the Santa man’s leg.
Unable to stop herself screaming in surprise, the last member of the strange group shoots round to face her, pointing a crossbow directly at her head and shouting to the others alerting them to her presence.
In the brief seconds that pass between the rest of the group turning their eyes on the girl and her raising her hands above her head in a well practiced motion the bleeding man stops screaming.
Thank god, she thinks. She really can’t handle the level of noise his screams were making. Though looking at his past out form, she does hope he isn’t dead.
“What the hell did you chop his leg off for?” She asks more curious than surprised. By this point she has firmly ruled out the rag tag group before her as a rescue team. Not that she really believed one would come.
Prisons aren’t a priority during disasters, and whatever has been going on outside these last months most certainly qualifies as that.
The government have probably written off everyone they locked up here as dead, and why bother checking for a bunch of castoffs.
Even if they were just kids.
But if this isn’t some botched rescue mission, then something must be seriously botched on the outside.
Because why else would a seemingly normal though granted scrappy group of people try break into a prison.
A prison overrun by a bunch of batshit people with some strain of rabies if she was to guess.
Food?
Well if that’s the case they will be disappointed, she’s eaten 3 quarters of her supply and even if what’s left would have been enough to last her at least another 5 months if she really stretched it. It wouldn’t do much good for so many people.
Not that they would be likely to share with her anyway, which makes her wonder if she should fight them for it.
If things are so bad civilians are breaking into a prison for food then the governments probably fucked off by now, no doubt hiding in bunkers and waiting whatever this is out while the rest of the world scrambles.
But the idea of fighting the people who currently have not only a crossbow but now a multitude of various other weapons, including two guns, pointed at her head seems ludicrous.
She’s not that suicidal, not yet anyway. And these people might just be her ticket out of here. Even if they take the food she could probably work something else out.
She’s heard bark is edible, and cows eat grass all the time.
“He got bit.” The man with the axe answers the question she had frankly forgotten she asked.
Bit? He got bit?
Fuck these people are just as batshit as the batshits outside.
“Why the fuck would hacking someone’s leg off be your first reaction to a bite. Why would that be your reaction at all for that matter! Take him to a fucking hospital or something.” She rambles incredulously.
Thinking that even if the government has fucked of their will at the very least be med tents set up by the army.
And even if there aren’t, cutting the guys leg off seems extreme.
But apparently, she’s the only one who thinks so, because the strange group stare at her like she has just asked them why oranges are orange.
“We don’t have time for this,” the bald man who blocked the doors finally says, snapping the rest of the strangers out of their impromptu staring competition and back to the bleeding man.
“He’s right, we’ve got to move. Daryl you take the back, t-dog and Maggie take the front, And Glenn will help me push hershel.” The man with the axe, evidently the leader of the team, instructs rapidly.
And before she can call them insane, the bald man and the woman are reopening the doors and charging back into battle against those things. The leader, and the twenty something who must be Glenn, push Hershel out into the fray on the wheeled table. The red neck with the crossbow, Daryl she thinks he was called, following close behind them after a warning glance in her direction.
Doors now open, she has a split second decision to make. Either follow the redneck who she is pretty sure wouldn’t hesitate to kill her and hope his group are good enough to fight their way through the rabid outside, or re-barricade the doors and wait to starve to death.
In the end, it’s not much of a choice.
‘Fuck me.’
***
Pulling himself from his mom’s reach where he had been letting her run her hands through his hair, Carl hurry’s to investigate the second he hears the cell bock doors open.
Turning the corner however, reveals carls worst fear playing out before him. People start shouting over each other as his dad and Glenn wheel hershel into the cell block, everyone scrambling to prepare one of the bottom bunks for him so they can start assessing the damage.
At first Carl is sure he’s already dead, and all he can think is how his mum is supposed to give birth without a doctor, or in the case of hershel, a veterinarian turned apocalypse doctor.
And then he hates himself for not caring about the death of the man who saved his life after he got shot.
Beside him Beth starts screaming into her hand, tears pouring down her face at the sight of her dad, still as a corpse, laid out before her.
And Carl feels even worse.
“Is he alive?” Beth sobs and Maggie rushes to comfort her sister, their dad’s blood soaking her hands.
“He was bit but we cut it off in time, he’s fine, we just got to stop the bleading” she soothes before turning to Carol, who has already used the blow torch they found in a hardware store to heat up the base of what looks like a metal janitors bucket.
Knowing where this is going and not wanting to watch, Carl slips out of the crowded cell and into the hallway where he can hear arguing.
Catching his dad who is heading towards the sound now that Hershel’s cared for, Carl asks him what’s going on.
“There’s a prisoner still alive, just stay with your mother,” he dismisses him before going off to deal with the stranger, much to carls chagrin.
Ignoring his dad’s instructions, Carl follows his dad round the corner to confront the prisoner, not wanting to be blindsided by an attack.
Carl knows strangers, having met enough on the road to know they mean nothing good. Not anymore. And a prisoner no less.
Carl remembers the corpses they put down yesterday when securing the courtyard and field. Remembers noticing how small some of them were, the ones dressed in prison garb that is.
It’s hard to tell with walkers, especially after the rot obscures what was once their face, but Carl was pretty sure some of them weren’t much older than him.
Not that they were tiny, but they didn’t seem quite grown either. It made him ill at the time, seeing the younger ones always do.
It makes it too easy to imagine himself in their shoes, realise that it could have been him if it wasn’t for Shane saving him and his mom at the start. Back when he was weak.
But then Carl reminded himself that even if he hadn’t made it, he still wouldn’t have been like the likes of these walkers.
Kids or not, they were prisoners. The bad guys his dad and Shane spent their lives putting Behind bars.
And after that, he couldn’t feel sympathy for the ones he put down. They were better off dead, if they had lived, they would be free to rome the world. To live out their depravities and violent whims.
If they were bad enough to get locked up in such a high security prison, they would have only been another thing to kill in this new world.
Kill or be killed.
That’s why Carl has to follow his dad, make sure he does what needs to be done.
Because even after everything, his dad is still a cop. He’s soft. He will see a kid and take pity.
But he sees a kid when he looks at Carl too, and Carl knows first hand he is anything but.
Turning the corner, Carl is met with the sight of Daryl, crossbow raised and pointing at a girl who Carl is surprised to discover is probably around his age.
He had been expecting someone closer to Beth’s age, maybe 16 or 17.
But this girl is a slight flighty thing. Thin in the arms and neck, though with some muscle retained around her biceps. She’s got a knife Carl notes, though she doesn’t hold it like she knows how to use it.
And she’s dressed in the same blue prison jumpsuit as the dead outside, except the top half of hers is tied around her waist revealing a grimy white tank underneath.
Her skin as dirty, but underneath the grime she appears naturally tanned. Her red hair pulled back in a greasy half up half down style, the choppy ends only brushing her shoulders where it looks like someone has had a go at it with blunt craft sissors and not much else.
She’s unassuming, almost harmless looking. Except for her eyes, a deep fired brown that catches almost red in the light, with an age to them that doesn’t match the rest of her.
She’s seen things, and that means she’s done things too. She’s dangerous, more so for how she can make herself look innocent. Carl can feel it working on his dad already, who tells Daryl to lower his weapon.
“She’s just a kid Daryl, put the bow down, she isn’t a threat-” His dad tries to say, but Carl cuts him off in protest.
“This is a high security prison dad, she got locked up for a reason.” He says, and Daryl backs him up with a “kids got a point.”
As for the girl, her only response is to roll her eyes and mutter a fervent “fucking observant” under her breath.
Carl scowls, watching as she turns to address his dad with an impertinent casualness that sets his teeth on edge.
“Earlier you said that old guy got bit, but cutting his leg off seems a bit extreme don’t you think? Couldn’t you have taken him to a hospital? There must still be one guarded from those things”
“Those things,” Carl scoffs mockingly. She really knows nothing then.
His dad shoots him the same look he always does when he wants Carl to leave the grownups to handle something. Which is all the time, and Carl never listens so really why does he try.
“How long you been held up in here,” his dad asks the girl when Carl makes it evident he’s going to ignore him.
“Since i was eleven, but the rabies thing started probably a year ago, maybe a little bit more. I lost track of the days a while back. When everything in here went crazy I was getting checked in the infirmary whilst most of the others were in the yard. One of the officers dragged me to the cafeteria and told me to wait. Think she was planning on putting the place on lockdown, but she never came back. Dead I think, or maybe she ran back to her family.” The girl finishes explaining her story.
Carls almost impressed she didn’t go mad all that time. Carls seen it happen before, Shane, Jim from the start, and that was with other people around.
Or maybe being alone has been what’s kept her sane. She doesn’t know what the worlds become. Hasn’t seen it, even if she has seen something.
Beside him, Carl hears his dad sigh the way he does when he thinks Carl is too young to understand something, but has to explain anyway.
"There is no hospitals, there's nothing left. No government, no internet, no shops, no anything. From what we can tell over half the populations gone. The dead have this earth now so if you had a family they’re probably gone.” He finishes his little speech with a half assed “I'm sorry." Tacked on to the end, and carls pleased to hear it doesn’t sound very sincere
“Nothing to be sorry for, I didn’t have anyone out there anyhow.” She shifts, awkward for the first time, and glances at the crossbow still pointed to her head.
She turns back to Carl’s dad.
“Look man, I’ve dealt with cops plenty before, you’re not gonna trust me no matter what I say. I get it, I know how your kind are. But I’ve been inside a long time, so you can understand I want to go outside. You can have my knife if you get your man to take that thing from my head, and we can all go outside together and work something out.” She negotiates, and true to her word she takes the knife she had been gripping and slides it along the floor towards his dad.
They all look at it wearily, before his dad picks it up and sticks it in his belt, motioning Daryl to lower his weapon.
He does, and the tension from her shoulders bleeds slightly.
But carls not satisfied.
“How’d you know he was a cop before?” He asks distrustingly, biting back annoyance when she sends him a pitying look. Him! Like he’s said something endearingly stupid.
“Well, you’re wearing a sheriffs hat and you don’t peg me as the type for dressing up so that leaves sentimental value. Plus with the fact you’re clearly his kid” -she motions to his dad- “makes it pretty obvious. Besides,” she shrugs “you can just tell.”
At her explanation, Carl catches his dad send Daryl an impressed look before turning to the girl and nodding.
“Alright, we’ll take you outside.”