Chapter Text
The quiet hum of walkers all around is deafening, as Carl staggers to his feet. But it does nothing to drown out the horrific sounds of the walkers who are feeding off mother and son right in front of them. There’s the terrible noises of squelching and tearing of flesh, and the gnawing and gulping of walkers that devour it.
Carl turns and sees his gun that’s fallen on the grass. He scoops it up and puts it back in his jeans. The other boy is fixed in some kind of trance. His eyes don’t leave the heap of undead bodies that blanket his mom, who occasionally come up streaked with red just to dive back down again.
Carl looks from Michonne, and then back to Rick, as the rumbling of the dead around them escalates a volume higher. When an agitated walker starts shuffling towards Rick, he’s forced to raise his ax and strike it down, and then it’s over. The sea of monsters is turning on them, Michonne’s sword is drawn, and there’s no time left.
“Go, Carl. Go!” Rick whispers forcefully, motioning forwards with his hand and spinning to keep sight of the bodies around him. Michonne’s already slashing when Carl turns to the still-paralyzed boy next to him.
“Ron, we have to go!” But if it weren’t for the hand that grabs him strongly around the forearm and pulls, Ron wouldn’t be able to follow blindly like he does, Carl dragging the both of them, keeping close to the path that Michonne hacks clear for them.
The four of them plummet along, Rick and Michonne making up the front and back with weapons drawn, through the mass of the dead, to the dim lights of the infirmary they see in the distance.
***
When they finally burst past the doors of the infirmary, the lights, the people and the absence of immediate danger, all feels blinding.
They rush in, Spencer hastily moving to close the door behind them, and then hustle to a stop. They shift gears immediately to collect themselves. Carl, Rick, and Michonne morph seamlessly from soldiers in the thick of a fight to the level-headed strategists they need to be, something they’ve learned time and time over.
There’s a blur of rapid conversation, between the newcomers and the people in the infirmary, Denise making sure no one is injured, all of them exchanging words about the situation outside, taking stock of who’s inside, and who is up and able to fight. Rick and Michonne are quickly formulating a plan to attack the walkers, deciding that may be their only hope. Carl’s at their side, paying intent attention and butting in when he has something to say.
And no one notices the other boy who came in with them, the boy who has backed away from the crowd with a sickly expression on his face, his eyes glassy and unseeing. They don’t notice as the boy’s skin goes an unnatural pale green color, or as his eyes roll back in his head and his body quickly goes lax. They don’t notice until there’s the loud thud of him hitting the wood floor.
Carl’s the first to jerk his head to the noise, and the rest follow a split second later.
“Ron? Ron!” Carl swiftly jumps to follow where Ron has fallen over, passed out and unconscious on the floor. He stoops to the ground and puts a hand to Ron’s cheek. Denise is close behind him, checking for a pulse with her fingers, looking Ron over for any injuries. “Let’s get this off him,” she says, referring to the gory sheet still covering Ron’s body. “Okay,” Carl whispers, and the two of them work to pull it over Ron’s head while the people around them stand, waiting anxiously.
After asking again if Ron had been bitten and giving him the quickest look over, Denise declares him all right. “I think he’s okay. He just passed out,” she concludes. “Let’s get him to a bed and then I can keep an eye on him.”
Carl and a couple others help Denise lift the boy off of the ground and walk him to a neighboring room, setting his limp form down onto a solitary bed covered in a blue blanket. Carl can’t quite pull himself away for a moment, even as Rick and Michonne go right back to readying everyone for their plan and Denise leaves to check on her more serious patients. He’s worried. He’s worried about the boy who just saw the last two members of his family ripped apart right in front of him. He’s worried about the boy who even before that was trying to kill him in a garage with a shovel.
Alone in the room while the dull rumble of battle plans continues from outside the door, and the rasping of walkers continues from outside the window, Carl stares at Ron, who lies passive and pale on the bed in front of him. Even now he doesn’t look peaceful. His brows are furrowed and the breaths that come from his open mouth and through his thin chest are scarily shallow. But Carl’s filled with dread as he wonders what Ron’s going to look like when he wakes up, when he wakes up into a nightmare even Carl’s never had to face. What kind of desperate thoughts are going to go through his head? What kind of desperate things could he pull, alone in this room?
Carl wants to stay. He wants to watch over the person he once considered a friend. He looks at Ron, from his disheveled hair matted with sweat and bits of blood, to his clothes which are tattered and stained with evidence of the ordeal they just went through. But hearing his dad and Michonne through the doorway, and remembering vividly just how many walkers have invaded their walls, Carl realizes he can’t stay. They need him. Whatever happens when Ron wakes up can’t be Carl’s responsibility. So without a last glance, he turns and leaves.
***
The night that follows is one of the most grueling Carl has experienced. There’s no time to pause, no time to think. Flanked by his dad and Spencer, armed with a knife in his hand, it’s walker after walker in front of him, body after body that falls at his feet. It’s an endless, exhausting struggle, with nothing but the smell of death in his nose and the shouts of other Alexandrians in his ears as they, too, put up a fight. It’s a struggle that at one point seems hopeless, it seems like there just might be too many of them, the undead who seem to never stop coming. But then a fire erupts from the pond, blazing brighter than the sun after a storm, blinding hope in Carl’s eyes. It renews a determination in every single person out there battling on the streets, with the hope that there just might be a way out of this.
So they go on, slashing down monster after monster, slowly eliminating the mass of the dead that wants to claim their home. And the fire does its job, attracting the swarm of walkers to its light until enough of them are claimed by it to give the town a fighting chance.
After several more hours of grueling effort, finally, finally, it seems almost every last one of the dead has been put down, that their town might be theirs again. The sun has risen, and even though the corpses littering the ground is a grim sight, it’s also a hopeful one. It’s evidence that every single one of them accomplished what almost no one thought they could – they saved their town themselves.
The relief-filled reunions with Daryl and Glenn have Carl completely forgetting about the boy he left in the infirmary, but once he remembers, he immediately rushes back to that room to check on him.
Entering hesitantly, Carl sees Ron still lying on the same bed, still in almost the same position that Carl left him. But approaching, he sees Ron’s eyes are open, staring ahead, but at the same time not appearing to see anything.
Ron doesn’t move at all as Carl slowly pulls a chair next to the bed and takes a seat, doesn’t even glance over. In fact, Carl wonders for a few minutes if Ron’s even aware that there’s someone else in the room at all.
The silence is heavy and thick, and Carl weighs the word and its lack of meaning on his tongue for several seconds before he says, “Hey,” quietly and delicately, truthfully afraid that a sound too loud will startle Ron.
He sighs under his breath when Ron still doesn’t seem to respond to or register Carl’s presence. Carl knows from experience that there’s never anything that can be said to console a freshly grieving person, so in the same quiet voice he says the only relevant thing to be said. “It’s over,” he tells Ron flatly, knowing that the words will probably hold little or maybe even no solace for Ron.
They sit there in the same stony silence for a long moment. Carl looks down and already starts to mull over the next moves to be made, what should be done with Ron and if there’s anything, anything Carl can do that would help him. Just as he’s comprehending more words to speak, Ron stirs. He starts slowly sitting himself up on the small mattress, eyes still glazed and unmoving, and then twists to put his feet on the ground off the side of the bed, facing away from Carl.
A little bit of hope lifts in Carl, thinking that maybe this is a sign Ron’s coming out of whatever state of shock he’s in. But the hope is short-lived as soon, he hears the loud and bleak sound of Ron retching onto the floor.
Carl rushes up, not to Ron’s side but back to the main room, to grab the first bowl that he sees, wet a washcloth, and even sneak off with a packet of crackers he finds.
He’s back in under a minute, and Ron’s in the same place, still spluttering and coughing. He takes the bowl that Carl passes to him in his pale hand as Carl ducks to the floor to clean up the mess.
“Here, you should eat this,” Carl says as he puts the packet of crackers into Ron’s shaky other hand. As he stands and puts the washcloth onto the nightstand, still unable to make eye contact with Ron’s bowed head, a knock comes from across the room.
Carl looks up to see his dad in the doorway, with Judith in his arms and a questioning look on his face. When Rick beckons him over, Carl steps around the bed to go to him.
“How’s he doin’?” Rick whispers once Carl’s close, nodding towards Ron.
Carl glances over in time to see Ron drop the crackers onto the bedsheets. He shakes his head. “Not good,” he whispers, turning back to his dad. “He’s not talking, and I don’t think he’s eaten anything.”
Rick just nods, surveying the boy hunched on the bed with a solemn look. Then he addresses Carl again. “He’ll be staying with us for a while. You okay sharin’ your room?”
“Yeah,” Carl nods, looking back at Ron, who has gone still again.
Rick sighs and straightens up. “All right. Why don’t you get him home then?” he says to Carl, who nods again.
“Do you want me to take her, too?” Carl asks, gesturing to Judith.
Rick looks down and shifts with Judith in his arms. “Nah, I got it,” he says then, seeming reluctant to part with her.
So Carl just nods a last time. As he turns to go back to Ron, his dad gives him a pat on the back, before leaving.
Carl has to support Ron off of the bed and out of the infirmary, as the older and slightly taller boy is still unsteady and shaky on his feet. Ron doesn’t meet any of the sympathetic eyes that are trained on the two of them as they leave the place.
On the dreaded trudge home, Carl tries to shield Ron as much as he can from the horrible sight of the bodies scattered about. Even still, they have to stop at the side of the road twice, for Carl to wait while Ron throws up again.
When they get back home and Carl shows him the bed that will be his, Ron wastes no time in dropping onto it without a word, hiding his face towards the wall and away from Carl. Carl stands there awkwardly for a few moments, wondering if there’s anything else he can do for his friend, before deciding to leave him in peace for now. As he leaves the room, he realizes that perhaps ‘friend’ is too generous a word. He and Ron weren’t exactly on good terms before venturing into the herd, and there’s no telling how Ron will feel about him now, now that the boy’s mom and brother, his entire family, is dead.