Lee Everett saw Clark Rogers, pipe in hand, freeze from behind their cover. And then his body moved, maybe half a step, before the fat walker that they'd evaded at the beginning of the supply run detonated.
Lee's brain didn't- couldn't comprehend what happened.
One moment, Clark was there, upright, pipe raised, the stillness of someone whose instincts had just raised an alarm that his body hadn't finished responding to yet. The next, the world turned white and wet and loud in a way that wasn't a sound so much as a physical force, a concussive pressure that hit Lee in the chest and stole the air from his lungs before he'd finished drawing it. He thought he saw something fly by him, hitting the hard glass pane of the lobby, but he ignored it, too busy trying to breathe.
He heard Clementine make a sound beside him that he had never heard from her before and hoped to never hear again.
The debris- the human parts and fog cleared in the way they did, not all at once, but in stages, the largest pieces first, then the smaller ones pattering down onto pavement like ugly rain. The smell arrived after, thick and awful and wrong in a way that bypassed the brain entirely and went straight to the stomach, enough that it'd make a grown man vomit.
Clark was gone from where he'd been standing.
Lee's eyes found him three seconds later, and the three seconds it took were the longest three seconds of his life.
He was against the far wall inside the lobby with them. The concrete one, the wall of the lobby, maybe fifteen feet from where he'd been standing. He'd gone through the glass pane, Lee could see the frame, the safety glass still hanging in jagged teeth from the edges, and then across the floor, and then into the wall, and he wasn't moving.
His brain struggled and fought every moment of his trying to understand what happened, until it clicked. The thing that flew by them, it wasn't an object.
…
He wasn't moving.
"Clark-" Clementine's voice. Lee had never heard it sound like that. Stripped of everything. Worry, panic, fear, anger, joy, happiness. It had nothing.
Just the name, raw and airless, the sound of someone whose brain had received information it refused to process. It couldn't process.
He turned to Kenny and saw the man's face turn pale, almost like a ghost, as the man seemed to fixate on Clark's body just lying down in the lobby, a red pool slowly forming around him. The stack of bottled water fell from their hands at some point, and now, they were just empty.
That's when they heard it, an inhuman scream, loud enough to pierce through the quietness and tear through everything in the entire neighborhood. They all felt a chill run down their spine as Clementine moved on, barely on steady legs.
Pushing through, until she crumbled halfway towards Clark, her eyes unmoving from his body. Lee noticed that she seemed to barely breathe, her hands folding in front of her stomach.
And then the groans and moans of the walkers in the upper floors of the apartment complex woke him and Kenny up.
Lee moved first because someone had to.
His legs were moving before his brain had finished catching up with what his eyes had already processed, and he crossed the lobby in four steps and crouched beside Clark before he'd made the conscious decision to do it.
Up close was worse.
He made himself look. He'd learned, months ago, that not looking was how you missed something that killed someone, and Clark was not going to die because Lee Everett had looked away. So he looked.
His clothes were ruined beyond repair, especially the front. His torso could be seen bare, while the top part of his pants barely survived. It was due to this that Lee noticed the flesh around the organs change, from a stone-like texture to one of flesh.
'One of his abilities.' Lee pushed through, but whatever it was, it wasn't enough protection.
There was a glass shard in Clark's left side, from the glass panel that he crashed into, maybe four inches of it visible above the surface of his shirt, the rest buried. Not spurting. That was the first thing Lee checked. Not spurting meant it hadn't hit anything immediately fatal, or it had and was plugging itself, and either way, the answer was the same: don't pull it.
The head was bad. The left side of his face and temple were painted red from the hairline down. Lee wasn't sure how bad the damage was up there; did him crashing into a wall fracture his skull? Did he protect himself with his stone-like skin? There were millions of questions, but no answer, and they didn't have the time to calmly assess the situation, not anymore, as the inhuman scream seemed to be getting louder, yet was being drowned by the dozens of echoes of the walkers that they were hearing now.
The leg.
Lee's jaw set hard, and he made himself keep his face neutral because Clementine was somewhere behind him.
The leg was dislocated at the hip, Lee thought, which was the best-case scenario. Not broken, or not only broken, which was the worst case. The angle of it was wrong in a stomach-dropping way, something that had been forced out of the place it was supposed to be. It lay against the floor, unmoving.
And then there was the bone.
Not Clark's. Lee could tell that from the color of it, the particular gray-white of something that had been dead for weeks, jutting from the lower abdomen at an angle that made his teeth come together.
Lee pressed two fingers to Clark's neck.
The pulse was there.
Weak. Thready. But there.
He exhaled once, hard, through his nose, and locked everything else down.
"Kenny." His voice came out level. He didn't know how. "Get over here."
Kenny's footsteps crossed the lobby. He heard them stop.
"Don't look at his face," Lee said, which was the only kindness he could offer right now. And because Lee couldn't look at his face either. The what-ifs running in his head. What if he didn't make it? What if everything they're about to do would be nothing but a waste of time, and they should leave him and just run. Because no one else would survive the damage that Clark had. "Look at me. Are you with me?"
A pause.
"Yeah." Kenny's voice was rough, like something had scraped the inside of it on the way out. "Yeah, I'm with you."
"He's got a pulse." He said it for Kenny's benefit and because the second he stopped saying true things out loud, he'd start saying the other things, the ones that lived on the other side of true. "We need to move him. We can't do it out here."
"Lee." Kenny's voice dropped. "That bone-..." He stopped himself, because if a bite from a walker meant that people turned, then to Kenny, having one of their bones in you should also be the same thing.
"I know."
"If we move him-"
"I know." He looked at Kenny directly. "We can't leave him in the lobby. You know that."
Kenny looked at Clark's face, despite what Lee had said, despite what his body screamed. That they needed to run, to panic, because they're about to die. Lee watched the man's expression do something complicated and private, and then close.
"Yeah," Kenny said again. "I know."
That was when the screaming started again. But closer.
Above them, the shuffle-drag of the third floor exploded into movement. Not one or two. More. The stairwell began to fill with sounds it hadn't been making a minute ago, and from outside the lobby doors, the ambient distant moaning that had become background noise over three months suddenly had direction.
It had purpose.
Lee stood. "We're out of time."
He turned to find Clementine.
She hadn't moved from where she'd crumbled. She was on her knees on the lobby floor, maybe eight feet from Clark, and she wasn't looking at his face. She was looking at his leg. The wrong angle of it. Her hands were folded in her lap, fingers interlaced, and she wasn't moving, wasn't blinking at the rate a person blinked, wasn't doing any of the things a person did when they were present in their own body.
"Clementine." Lee crossed to her and crouched in front of her, putting himself between her eyeline and Clark. "Sweet pea. Look at me."
She didn't look at him.
Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, the place just past his shoulder where Clark was, and her face had the look of a face that had stopped performing anything. Not grief. Not shock. Not fear. Just…- absence. The particular stillness of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else and left the body sitting in a lobby in Macon.
"Clementine." He put a hand on her shoulder. Shook it once, firm. "I need you with me right now."
Nothing.
The stairwell door banged. Once, twice, with the particular rhythm of something pushing against it from the other side and finding resistance and pushing again.
"Lee." Kenny's voice, from behind him, low and urgent. Seeing Lee's back still turned, the captain of a fishing boat opened the stairwell door and crushed the walker's skull with the back of his rifle.
He moved up a couple of stairs to scout and came back. "We still have time. The stairs are clear!" He moved to Clark, going on the knees, his weapon now on his back, a hand went under Clark's knee, while the other wrapped Clark's arm around his neck. With a groan, he stood up, carrying Clark in a princess carry to the stairs.
Their target, go back to the first floor and settle into the apartment they just scavenged.
Lee didn't have time to be gentle.
He got his hands under Clementine's arms and pulled her upright, and when her legs didn't cooperate, he kept his grip and turned her physically, putting her back to Clark, putting his face in front of hers.
"Clementine, sweet pea." He said it differently this time. Not the firm, managing voice. The other one, the one he used when he needed her to hear him through whatever was happening inside her head. "I need you to walk. Right now. Just walk. That's all."
Her eyes moved. Fractionally. Not to him, not yet, but they moved.
The other stairwell door banged.
"He's alive," Lee said, and he watched her eyes change. Still not present, still not back, but something had snagged on the words, caught, and held. "Clark is alive. His pulse is there. But I need you to walk, because we cannot help him if we are standing in this lobby when those doors open." He put his hands on either side of her face, gentle but firm. "Walk with me."
Her breath came in, sharp and ragged, like a person surfacing.
She stood.
Not steadily. Not with any of the particular controlled efficiency she'd developed over weeks of training and even before that, months of learning how to walk silently. She stood the way a person stood when their body was operating on something below conscious thought, legs moving because something had been asked of them and they were answering before the mind had decided.
Lee kept his hand at her elbow and moved.
Kenny was already at the stairwell door, Clark carried across his arms, his weight redistributed into the particular careful balance of a man who had spent decades hauling things on a boat and knew exactly how to move something fragile without dropping it. He'd arranged Clark's head against his shoulder. The bad leg hung wrong, and Lee saw Kenny's jaw set every time he moved, the deliberate not-looking that was its own kind of focus. As soon as they got to the stairwell, they shut the door behind them. In the meanwhile, the other stairwell door burst open, a walker- no, a thing- kept running, without a single moment of hesitation, and crashed into the door they just shut.
The door held.
Lee didn't wait to find out if it would hold a second time.
"Move." He said it low, one hand still at Clementine's elbow, and they went up the stairs fast, Kenny ahead of them with Clark across his arms, taking each step with the careful, deliberate thought of a man who understood that rushing was how you dropped something you couldn't afford to drop.
Behind them, the thing hit the door again.
Not the shuffle-drag of a regular walker. Not the mindless pressure of something that had found an obstacle and was applying itself to it by just pressing its body without understanding why. This was different. Faster between impacts. Unpurposeful in a way that made the hair on Lee's arms stand up before his brain had finished processing why.
He glanced back through the stairwell door's small window as he passed it.
The thing in the lobby was on the floor, having hit the door hard enough to bounce. It was already getting up.
Getting up fast.
Lee had seen walkers for three months. He knew how they moved. He knew the awkward reassembly of a dead body, trying to remember locomotion, the half-second delay between intention- if they had any, and action.
This thing stood up the way a person stood up. One motion. No delay.
It turned toward the door.
Its face was wrong. The jaw was dislocated due to the impact, and the same could be said about the left side of its face, hanging at an angle that should have made sound impossible, and yet the sound coming out of it was the same as the regular walkers they would normally face. A growl. Then it ran, from zero to a hundred, and crashed into the door once more, bouncing back on its back.
"Lee." Kenny's voice from the landing above, strained with Clark's weight, was missing everything that Lee witnessed. "Now."
He took the stairs two at a time as his skin crawled with ants, and he felt aging up a few years.
First floor. The apartment they'd cleared.
Kenny didn't slow down at the door. Lee got ahead of him, found the lock, and his hands were moving before he'd consciously decided on the approach, the tools out, the particular focused stillness that Carley had drilled into him settling over his fingers despite everything his body was screaming.
The lock didn't move.
He tried again. His hands were steadier than they had any right to be, but the tumblers weren't cooperating, and behind them, from somewhere below and outside, the screaming had started again, and this time it was close. Maybe right in front of the apartment complex. The building's upper floors were emptying downward, the shuffle-drag becoming a cascade that he could feel through the walls.
"Clementine." He turned to her.
She was standing where he'd placed her, her back to the wall beside the door, and she was present in the way someone was present when their body had returned before the rest of them had. Her eyes were focused, technically, but at the wrong distance.
"Clementine." He said it more sharply this time, and her eyes snapped to him.
"Pick it." He held out the tools.
A beat. The longest beat.
Then her hands came up and took them.
He stepped back. Kenny was three feet away with Clark across his arms, his breathing controlled in the way of a man managing something very heavy, and he was not going to acknowledge it. He looked behind them, to the stairs, every few seconds, his patience slowly turning into panic. Lee watched Clementine's fingers go to the lock and stop.
"Sweet pea-"
"I've got it." Her voice was flat, with barely any emotion. Which was much better than a couple of moments ago.
She worked the lock.
Five seconds. Ten.
Behind them, the stairwell door at the bottom of the building crashed open, while Kenny saw a rotten hand grab a corner wall and pull itself up.
The sounds that came up from downstairs were wrong. Too fast.
The lock clicked.
Lee had the door open before the sound had finished.
Kenny went through first because Kenny had Clark, Lee went last, pulling the door shut behind him, and in the half second before it closed, he saw the stairwell door on their floor begin to open.
Due to adrenaline, he didn't ask the question that would have burned him to know.
'Since when could they open doors?'
…
…
…
The master bedroom.
Kenny set Clark down on the bed with the focused, contained gentleness of a man operating past the point where gentleness came naturally, and it cost him something visible. He straightened up slowly, one hand on the bedpost for a moment, and looked at the wall with a grimace.
Lee didn't look at his face. Kenny didn't want to be looked at right now, and Lee understood that.
He was already moving, back to the main room, pulling the couch first because it was the heaviest thing within reach. The table next. The chair. Anything with weight and width that he could wedge into the gap between the door and them. It wouldn't hold forever. He knew that. But forever wasn't what they needed. They needed time, and furniture against a door bought time, and time was the only currency that mattered right now.
The screaming outside was constant.
Not one voice anymore. The original had been joined by others, the sound layering and building until it stopped being individual voices and became something else, something with mass and direction, the audio equivalent of a wave that had decided where it was going. If the wave were bodies of the dead that could tear a chunk of human flesh with a bite.
Lee finished with the door and turned back to the bedroom.
Kenny had settled at the foot of the bed, his expression filled with anger that was masking something that Lee couldn't pick up on. That's how his friend was: anger, frustration, annoyance, all of these emotions were used to mask what he really felt.
Clark was on the bed, breathing roughly, while Clementine continued to tremble by his side, eyes going all over his injuries and trying to figure out which one she could help with.
In his private corner, Lee thought otherwise.
He took note of Clark's injuries once more, ignoring the whispering dark thoughts. He had to try to save him at least.
So, he used what he barely remembered from his seminar- two Saturday mornings in the school gymnasium, a Red Cross instructor with a dry sense of humor and a plastic mannequin named Gerald, back when the most dangerous thing Lee Everett had faced was a parent-teacher conference that had gone badly. It was way before he even met his ex-wife. He'd taken the course because the district required it, sat through it with his gradebook open on his lap, and left thinking he'd never use a single thing he'd learned.
He was grateful now for every word of it.
Control the bleed first. Everything else is secondary until the bleed is controlled.
The head damage needed to be dealt with first, because of the blood. So, he moved, inspecting the injury with the help of a shaking Clementine. Immediately, they found a cut at the back of Clark's head. A small cut, but it seemed deep.
"Hold this." He pressed a folded square of gauze from the first aid kit to the back of Clark's head and guided Clementine's hand to it. "Firm pressure. Don't lift it to check. Just hold."
Underneath the skin, they could feel the bone being soft. Tears escaped Clementine, and a sob escaped her lips. But before Lee could comfort her, she wiped all of it off, even when new ones replaced the old ones, and held Clark as if her life depended on it.
"I need to check for a concussion," Lee spoke with a whisper, opening one eyelid and then the other. The pupils, one was bigger than the other. "Shit!"
"What, why, why- shit?" Clementine asked, almost choking on her words. Lee didn't immediately answer her. Instead, he inspected the gauze in her hand, seeing it turn red, and then replaced it with another layer.
"Lee." She begged, and Lee finally looked at her and then at the statue of Kenny. "Unequal pupils means the brain took a hit," he said, keeping his voice level. He saw Clementine's teary eyes widen and then go to her lover's face, a drop falling on Clark's face. He heard Kenny click his tongue and moved to the living room.
"Bring me the other kit." Lee ordered, not checking if Kenny heard him or not. He needed to keep the man and himself busy so they could stop hearing the moans and growls that was coming from the hallway and the entire block.
Clementine- she was a different story, as her entire being was focused on Clark, and only Clark.
"We stabilize what we can," Lee said to her. "Then we wake him slow."
The glass shard.
He grimaced, feeling helpless. The basic thing he knew was that if he took it out, there was a big chance that Clark would lose a lot of blood, even more than what he had lost, as he checked the pale, sickly looking boy.
They couldn't afford that, so he didn't touch the glass shard at all. He inspected around it, looking for any sign that leaving it might cause more damage or faster death than blood loss, but nothing. At least, nothing that he found.
He glanced at Clementine's head on Clark's head, and the second layer of the gauze was now bloodied as well. But it had slowed down. That's when Kenny came back with the second kit. The man clenched his jaw, eyes fixed on the bone sticking out of Clark's guts, and then his leg being the wrong way.
"Kenny." Lee stopped him.
Another click of tongue in frustration and anger, and then he marched off to the living room, supposedly to guard and buy them time if the walkers ever broke down the door. They both knew the chances of Clark making it out of this were close to zero. But they couldn't say it out loud for Clementine's sake.
So, Lee moved to the other thing that he could probably fix.
The leg.
He moved to it, and beside him, he heard Clementine make a very small, very controlled sound that she immediately closed down. He understood. The angle of it was the kind of thing that the eye rejected before the brain had any thought on it.
"Dislocated," Lee said, because saying it out loud made it a manageable thing rather than an image that they could only frown at. "Hip, I think. Not broken. Or not only."
"Kenny-" He called out to his friend, because he needed him. And the man was summoned as if he were waiting. "We have to put it back in place."
"Can you fix it?" Kenny asked from the door.
"I know the theory." He looked at Kenny. "I had taken a seminar on first aid, and the instructor went through it." He didn't mention how he wasn't paying much attention back then, until it was time to practice it on a mannequin or other people who were simulating the injury. "It requires-" He stopped, because what it required was two people who knew what they were doing and a patient who was unconscious, which was actually the one advantage they had right now. "It requires controlled traction and rotation. If I do it wrong, I can make it worse."
"And if you don't do it?" Clementine asked. She was watching him, not the leg.
"If there's nerve involvement and we leave it, he could lose feeling in it." He didn't soften it, because she hadn't asked him to. "We move him with it like this, same risk."
The room was quiet except for the walkers outside and the occasional impact against the barricaded door.
Nothing bashing against it, crying to let it in.
Just the regular pressure of the dead finding an obstacle and applying themselves to it. Whatever that thing in the stairwell had been, it either hadn't found their floor yet or had moved on to something louder.
Neither reassured him.
"Do it," Clementine said.
"Clementine-"
"Do it, Lee." Her voice didn't waver. She looked at him, and Lee could see her aging in front of his eyes. Not the physical kind of aging, but the mental one. Her eyes had turned like steel, almost like Clark's own flat, direct expression, the one that wasn't asking, just stating. "He's not going to wake up and tell you to. So I'm telling you."
Lee looked at her for a long moment, his heart breaking.
He wanted her to stay young for a few more days, maybe a couple of weeks more. Just until they went to Savannah. He looked at her steel brown eyes and found it not wavering even a bit. As if her breakdown at the lobby hadn't happened.
A moment.
That's all it took, and Lee would always remember this day.
He closed his eyes, breaking the stare down, and then nodded.
Because there was nothing else he could say or do. The choice was made. He moved to the foot of the bed.
"Kenny." He positioned his hands. "I need you to stabilize his pelvis. Both hands, firm, here-" He guided Kenny's hands to the correct position. "Don't let him rotate. Whatever happens, don't let him rotate."
Kenny set his hands firmly and didn't ask questions.
"Clementine." She met his eyes. "Talk to him. Don't stop. I don't know how much he can hear, but talk to him."
She turned back to Clark, her hands still on the gauze, and leaned close, her mouth near his ear. He saw her close her eyes as her final tears dried out. A kiss landed on Clark's cheek. Then she lovingly called his name in his ear.
Lee didn't listen to what she said afterward. That was hers.
He focused on his hands, on the angle, on the half-remembered instructions of a man. Clark's body moved under his hands, and from somewhere in the unconscious, Clark made a sound- the body registering pain it couldn't fully surface to feel- and Clementine's voice didn't stop. It got quieter, lower, closer to his ear.
He heard whispers of her love for him, her worries, her fears, and their future. That she couldn't do it if he wasn't there with her. He heard Carley being mentioned and then himself, alongside Kenny, and his family, Lilly and Larry, and others.
She spoke to him, that she needed him more than ever.
They needed him.
Lee didn't stop.
There was a sound. Not a crack. More like a shift, something finding its place after being forced out of it, and Lee held the position and counted to five the way the instructor had said, and then carefully, carefully released the traction.
He straightened up.
The angle was better. But that didn't mean it was right. For all Lee could know, he might have done it wrong, and they'd have to dislocate it again and fix it later down the line.
He looked at Clark's face, which was still, pale, and younger than it ever looked when he was conscious.
"Okay," Lee said, to no one and both of them. Kenny let Clark go and let out a sigh of relief. For a few minutes after that, the man's mask and walls had fallen. Instead, there was nothing but worry on his face.
Lee pressed two fingers to the pulse again. Still there. Marginally stronger, or he was telling himself that, and right now he was going to let himself. "Okay."
He pulled the desk chair to Clark's bedside and sat down heavily in it, almost collapsing on it the same way a man who had been upright on adrenaline and had just run out.
"Now we wake him," he said. "Slow. And we keep him awake."
Clementine hadn't moved from Clark's side. Her hands were still on the gauze, still applying the pressure he'd asked for, and her forehead was resting lightly against Clark's temple, and she was still talking, very quietly,
Lee looked at Kenny.
Kenny looked back.
Neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that the room hadn't already said, and the walkers outside were a problem that existed in the future, and the future was where it could stay for exactly as long as Clark Rogers needed to open his eyes.
===============================
AN: YOYO, hope everyone's good. It's been a while.
I'm kinda tired, so I'll just say what my thought process for this chapter was.
I believe this is the most risky chapter that I've uploaded for this story. Making Clark take a huge backseat and do this, I'm kinda nervous as to what you guys will do to me. But I kinda had to…?
I did it because I wanted to remove the "safety" blanket that Clark had set on the group. They had water, food, and shelter. They haven't met anyone other than Clark from outside their group, and so far, no zombies have tested their defense. So, they are getting comfortable. Even in canon, they had hit this wall, wanting to stay in the motel, until the bandits forced them out.
So, what's the best way to wake them up from their comfort zone? Have their best source of food taken out. And then be faced with runners and a new variant that I cooked up. I call it, "Kings."
I'm going to show more of it in the future chapters, but for now, I'll leave you guys with a tease.
The next chapter would be Clark's POV, probably. Haven't thought that far ahead due to real-life stuff stressing me out. Also, sorry if the chapter isn't that good. I am running around like a headless chicken right now, doing multiple things.
Regarding the tickets, what should he get?
At first, I thought I would only give him, maybe, a gold for surviving the bloater/boomer zombie's point-blank explosion. But then, I thought, should we only give him gold/platinum for surviving ALL of it. Or should we divide it up. I.e: Gold for boomer explosion, silver for being ragdolled and surviving, 2 other silver for the shard and the bone sticking out of him, and finally, bronze for the head injury?
Reminder, for all these tickets, we'd have to roll a d20. So, there's a chance that if we go with only gold for ALL of it. Then the roll from d20 would either rank it down or just destroy the ticket all together.
You can also suggest your thoughts. How many tickets should he get and the ranks and the reason behind them. I'll think about them all and make my decision next chapter.
It's all up to you guys. If I don't get many answers, I'll just go with a coin flip.
Anyway, that's all from me. I had fun writing this chapter. It was relaxing.
Cya guys in the next one.
WEBNOVEL READERS: Gotta complain: Man i hate this site's "word version" or whatever it is. I hate Inkstone. Cause as soon as my chapters go for more than 3k words. It freaking lags and freezes my browser. Sometime even craching. FIX IT DEV, PLEASE.
Anyway, reason as to why I am now adressing you guys is cause someone said to include you guys into the votes and discussion due to the attraction this story has here as well. So, I thought why not. For the next chapter, I'll also take you guys' words and advice and such in consideration and include them.