Chapter 32:
Ben's legs made the decision his brain was still processing. He turned. He ran. He hit the gate on the way out, bounced off it, and kept going. The sound of his footsteps on the drive turned to crashing undergrowth and then faded.
He was gone, the only sound left was the generator hum and the evening birds starting up. Larry huffed and breathed through his nose. He lowered the rifle as soon as Ben's figure disappeared into the tree lines.
…
In the forest, fifteen meters past the gate, Ben was sitting against an oak tree with his knees drawn up and his arm leaking steadily through the makeshift bandage the people who took him in had done. He'd been shaking since the RV.
All because he provided useful information. That the farm owners were killed, and new people- his group- his old group had taken over. They took him in, gave him food and water, and thanked him, genuinely.
He hadn't expected that.
He'd expected to be used and discarded the way everything in this world got used and discarded, the way he'd been used and discarded by people who were supposed to be his group. Instead, he was thanked for, seen, and appreciated for the first time in forever. He was brought to the leader, Marcus Doyle, and the man warmly welcomed him to Save-Lots.
He'd tried to argue for Duck, but Marcus shook his head when the squad leader explained to him that the boy would die due to his injuries. So, they simply left him.
The nonchalant way of saying it disturbed Ben until Marcus scolded his man and explained it carefully to him that what his man had done was wrong and that he'd send some people back to the RV to take care of the boy.
And speaking of the RV, he was told that since they had come from the farm's direction, they thought the cannibals were escaping, which they couldn't let it happen. It was a simple misunderstanding. To show that they were sorry, Marcus separated the motel's supply from theirs.
'You can tell them what happened and let them take back everything they had.'
The memory repeated itself in Ben's head, but was filled with rage. He had returned to help his group and to tell them that Kenny had been killed in a mistake. He just wanted to help them.
He'd wanted to help them.
That was the thing that kept repeating in his head, sitting against the oak with his arm leaking and his pants still damp and the sound of Larry's voice counting down from three still in his ears. He had wanted to help them. He had walked back to that farm with Marcus's people a distance behind him, keeping out of sight, giving him the space to do what he'd gone to do.
And Larry had aimed a rifle at his head.
Ben pressed the back of his head against the oak bark and stared at the darkening sky through the canopy.
He thought about Duck.
He tried not to. He'd been trying not to since the RV.
Marcus had said he'd send people back. Marcus had said it was a misunderstanding and that it was wrong and that he'd fix it. Marcus had been the only person in months who had said that everything Ben had experienced in the past few months was wrong, and that he was going to fix it, and that was- that was something.
Footsteps in the undergrowth, careful and deliberate, the sound of someone who moved through dark forests as a professional habit.
Marcus Doyle settled himself against the oak beside him, unhurried, the ease of a man who had nowhere better to be.
He looked at Ben's arm without comment and reached into his jacket, producing a clean strip of cloth that he held out without making it into a gesture.
Ben took it.
"They didn't let you talk," Marcus said.
"No." Ben worked the cloth around his arm with his teeth and his free hand- struggling, his voice cracked- "let me." Marcus offered, wrapping the cloth around his injured arm.
"He had a rifle up before I got through the gate." He stopped, his voice shaky. "He was going to shoot me."
Marcus's expression was the expression of a man receiving information about an injustice and taking it seriously. It was very good.
"Yeah," he said. "I saw." He was quiet for a moment. "You were trying to help them."
Ben said nothing.
"You walked back to tell them about the RV. About Kenny." Marcus looked at the gap in the tree line where the farm drive was visible in the fading light. "And they aimed a rifle at you."
"That was you trying to help them survive," Marcus said. He looked at Ben directly, the attention of someone who had decided you were worth looking at, which was a more powerful thing than it sounded when you'd been invisible for long enough, even if that came from a bandit group that had attacked his school in the beginning.
"You didn't ask to be in this situation. You didn't ask to be part of a group that treated you like a problem. You did your best with what you had." He paused. "And your best was better than they gave you credit for."
Ben looked at the farm, finding himself nodding.
He thought about the Monopoly games, sitting on the crate by the fire while Clark collected his hotels and Duck complained loudly, and Clementine's shoulder leaned-
He stopped thinking about Clementine's shoulder on Clark's or their quiet, desperate moans and groans that traveled to the parking lot-
"Tell me about them," Marcus whispered, and Ben began, starting by how he met. How they took him and his injured friend in, and how, from then on, he was seen as if he were an eyesore, nothing but a deadweight. That anything he did, even if it was to help, he was slapped and told to get lost, his help not needed.
Even when he was doing nothing and staying out of their way, he was seen as a chore, unlike Clark Rogers, who everyone praised for doing nothing but existing. Ben told Marcus every single detail of how someone who had come to them on the same day as Ben was seen as a hero, while they treated him horribly. And once he was tired of ranting about Clark this or that, he would change to Larry, or Lilly, or Lee, their interaction with others, their relationship with each other, how they took care of each other as a group and as individuals, while he was pushed to the corner, told to do nothing because he was amount to nothing. Anything that he touched would break down.
And then, he would return to Clark Rogers. How he lied and cheated and guilt-tripped Clementine into sleeping with him, even when she had shown that she liked Ben and had flirted with him before that.
Marcus listened to all of it.
He was good at listening. Ben had never had someone listen to him like this- the full, unhurried attention of a man who seemed to find everything he said genuinely interesting, who didn't interrupt or redirect, who just received it and nodded and occasionally asked a quiet follow-up that opened another door Ben hadn't known he wanted to walk through.
He talked about Clark for a long time.
He talked about the hunting, the food appearing from nowhere, the immunity, and that he supposedly had a cure he'd only half-understood. He talked about the pipe that was back in the RV, its sharpened edge, and the split skulls.
He talked about the ring on Clementine's finger.
He talked about the way the whole group moved around Clark like he was the center of something, the way even Lilly had stopped arguing with him after the first week, the way Lee deferred to him in the field without seeming to notice he was doing it, the way Carley looked at him like he was the reason she hadn't stopped hoping.
He talked about Clementine.
He talked about how she'd started finding reasons to be near him during training, how she'd sat with the cat for hours on the walkway, how she'd spent three days at his bedside when he was supposedly sick.
Marcus received it the same way he'd received everything else.
"She chose him," Marcus said when Ben had finished, panting, eyes teary, and body shaking. He didn't know when, but Marcus had wrapped an arm around him in comfort.
"Yeah."
"Because he could provide. Because he had things that kept them alive." Marcus's voice was measured, the voice of someone laying out a logical sequence rather than making an argument. "Not because of who he is."
Ben was quiet.
"In the old world," Marcus said, "a girl like that chooses differently. She has options. She has time. She has the luxury of choosing someone based on- " He paused, finding the right point. "Based on feelings. On compatibility." He looked at the farm. "This world doesn't give her that luxury. This world gives her survival. And survival looks like Clark Rogers, based on what you said."
Ben pressed his lips together, hurt.
"That's not a reflection on you," Marcus said. "That's a reflection on circumstances. On what the world rewards now." He let that sit for a moment. "Those circumstances can change."
Ben looked at him.
"You're with us now," Marcus said. "You learn what I know. You stop being the person that group made you into, which was a person who took what was handed to him and said thank you." He looked at Ben directly. "You start being someone who decides what he takes."
Ben's jaw was tight.
"What are you going to do with them?" he asked.
"I'm going to take their farm for treating you so wrong," Marcus said, pleasantly. "And I'm going to have a conversation with them about what comes next." He stood, brushing the oak bark from his jacket. "Nobody has to die if they're reasonable." He said it the way someone mentions the weather.
"They-"
"Will be fine," Marcus said, smoothly. "I told you. I'm not a monster. As long as no one threatens us or puts us in danger, everything will be fine."
Ben nodded in relief, but he especially liked how he was included in that "us."
Marcus Doyle was not going to explain to Ben what he was, because explaining it would require a longer conversation than the situation warranted, and also because Ben wasn't ready to hear it yet. Ben needed a few more weeks of being seen and fed and spoken to like a person before the other parts of what Save-Lots was could be introduced gradually as the reasonable conclusions of an unreasonable world.
That was how it worked.
That was how he could have loyal pawns do his dirty work.
"Come on," Marcus said. "Let's go get you looked at properly."
Ben stood.
He tried not to think about Duck. About the RV. About whether the people Marcus had sent back had actually gone, and what they'd found there, and whether Duck's chest had still been moving by the time they arrived.
He tried very hard.
He mostly succeeded.
…
Talia was a few meters away, listening to Marcus and the idiot's talk, until the moron was shooed away, usefulness gone.
"So?"
"Small group, we can leverage their relationship with each other and get what we want. Based on what he said, the old man, Larry, I think?" Marcus scratched his head after a sigh, "He's going to be a problem."
"I can send some guys, check their reaction." Talia offered, but her boss shook his head, a grin on his face that did things to her heart. "Nah, we've already got everything we need from the brat."
She hummed in agreement as Marcus wrapped his arm around her body, a hand groping her breast. She couldn't help but want more. But duty called as she reported what she was told over the radio.
Talia straightened, "Western sweep clear. Northern group reports a horde moving away from this position." A pause. "And there's a development from the monitoring team."
"Tell me."
The monitoring team had been on Terminus since the group had first established that Terminus was the kind of operation that warranted monitoring. They'd been patient about it because you didn't build a group of thirty-plus functional people in the middle of an apocalypse by being impulsive or reckless.
He thought that sending the small group of bandits to deal with Terminus at the beginning was all that it required to put the family with a hero-complex down, but it turns out you had to do things yourself if you wanted it done correctly. Because not even a few weeks later, he was told that the idiots who had been given Terminus with a gift package had lost it.
Marcus had mounted an attack against them, but they were prepared and fought back, killing and then eating his men, which turned into a war between their group and Terminus.
But what came through the radio was not what he'd expected.
Not the content, exactly. He'd expected Terminus to fall eventually; any operation built on the combination of cannibalism and centralized location was running on borrowed time, and Marcus had simply been waiting for circumstances to present an opportunity for him to be the one doing the falling.
"The compound is overrun. Horde breached at approximately-" She paused, reading from her note. "-eighteen hundred. Active fire reported during the breach. After the fire stopped, the monitoring team picked up a new variant inside the perimeter."
"Variant," Marcus repeated, a tired sigh leaving him.
"Bipedal. Estimated height, ten feet and a little above." Talia's voice didn't change, but she showed with her expression that she was disturbed by how new types of infected seem to be popping up one after another, which was- Marcus could admit- its own kind of alarming.
"They said it was extremely fast, feeding the Terminus personnel to the infected, almost like a screamer." She looked up. "The monitoring team held position until they confirmed the compound was no longer functional."
Marcus looked at the farm. The four stone shapes were behind the farmhouse as Marcus tried to figure out when the Johns had started to make those. Their surfaces the color of the farm's earth.
He watched them for a long moment as he thought about how to loot the remains of Terminus. Due to their eating habits- Marcus chuckled to himself at that joke- they were bound to have a treasure trove of supplies, from clothes to medical and even hygienic, maybe…
"Is the horde in the compound leaving the area yet?" Marcus asked his third in command, who shook her head.
"Last report was during your talk with…" her eyes went to the back of the moron who doomed his former group without knowing, "they're staying put."
Marcus hummed, pinching her nipples through her clothes, making her gasp in surprise and pleasure, a grin on his face, before he let her go.
"I think it's time to handle the farm." He announced, motioning towards their new recruit. "Test him, give him the usual."
Talia nodded, her bra gun already ready to be used for the test.
"I'll have everyone else mobilize."
"Hmm, yeah. Better safe than sorry. Twelve on the south fence, eight on the drive." He paused. "Tell the distraction squads to make more noise in case there's some gunfight here."
Talia nodded.
After a few more minutes to give his men time to circle the trapped targets, Marcus nodded to Talia, slowly walking from the cover of the trees and towards the green gate.
Then a shot came from the south fence.
Inside the farmhouse, everyone had gone to the living room, staring at the men slowly walking up to the front. A wave of unease and tension gripped their hearts. Clementine was at the window, watching with others. She thought of sending the golems at them, but thought otherwise. Not yet, at least since the fastest they could run at was average human speed.
"Get away from the glass." Lee's hand on her shoulder, firm, pulling her back, and she let him because he was right. Lilly was at the second window, angled to the wall, her rifle up, eye at the scope. Her voice was the controlled voice, the military voice, the voice that had nothing in it except information and purpose.
Carley was pulled down by Mark, who stayed down as well, while Larry, with his usual scowl, sat on the couch, unbothered, but worried for Lilly.
"How many can you count?" Lee asked.
"At least twelve at the front, eight on the drive." She told him, while Mark left the living room, going to the back and seeing men on the other side of the house as well, beyond the electrical fence. "There's about five on the back." He reported.
"And they probably have men hiding in the trees, so give it thirty or so," Lee muttered, a frown on his face as he tried his best to think about how to escape a group that large.
The voice came through the front door before anyone had decided what to do with the information.
"Ladies and gentlemen in the farmhouse." Warm. Easy. The voice of someone who enjoyed it. "You've had a rough couple of days. I get that. I'm not here to make it worse than it has to be. Come out. Hands visible. All of you."
Nobody moved.
"I have people on every side of this place," the voice continued. "I have a friend who told me exactly how many of you there are and what you look like." A pause, timed. "I know about the pregnant one. I know about the old man's heart." Another pause. "I can put enough rounds through these walls that the house stops being a house, or you can come out, and we talk like civil adults. I'll count to thirty."
The room went very still.
Lee's eyes found Carley's. She had her hand flat against the wall, her face pale, she was trying her best not to show fear but was barely managing it, and she met his eyes and gave him the smallest nod, the nod that said I'm okay.
Lilly was watching the scope. Her jaw worked once.
Larry was on the couch with his hand against his chest and his eyes on his daughter's back, and Clementine watched him think the same thoughts everyone was thinking, which Mark voiced out loud.
"How the fuck do they know all that?"
She remembered Ben going to the forest, and then a few minutes later, this man and his group appeared. She realized who it was.
"Ben," Clementine said.
The word sat in the room.
Lilly lowered the rifle. Not in surrender. In the careful way of someone removing a provocation before it could be answered. "If we go out, we're alive," she said. "If we stay in, we're not." She looked at Lee. "He hasn't fired yet."
Clementine could see how Lilly was barely holding herself together from not raging at that name. How badly she wanted to go back and take her father's place. She wished that her dad had killed him instead of letting him go. An act of mercy that had turned against them.
"He's waiting for us to come out first," Lee said, deciding to go with Lilly's plan to keep others calm from cursing at the name. Clementine herself felt more betrayed than when Kenny drove away. She had good, fond memories that had Ben in them, with the prominent one being the board games they played. His patience with Duck and her while he explained Monopoly and other card games he knew.
"Yes. Which means he wants something from us that a body can't give him." She looked at the door. "We go out. We find out what it is. We buy time." Lilly nodded to Lee.
"For what?" Carley couldn't help but ask. "Clark wouldn't be able to handle all of them alone, especially if we're hostages."
Lilly went to answer-
"Guys, we don't have much time left. He's already on Twenty." Mark interrupted.
Larry stood. His legs were steady and breathing calm, but his eyes had fire in them. "Nothing's gonna be done if we're just staying still." He told everyone, leading the way, his figure tight and ready for a fight.
They went outside, one by one.
…
Marcus Doyle was standing at the gate with his hands in his jacket pockets, which was the posture of someone who wanted to show his men and his enemies the ease with which he had total control over this interaction.
He looked at each of them as they came through the farmhouse door, the quick, professional inventory of someone cataloging a room that he got from his days as the branch manager of a Save-Lots store. Talia was one of the clerk manager that had worked there for about five years and had an affair after her second because of her beauty. Though she was slowly starting to lose it, and while he had some replacement in mind, the group in front of him had some pretty good options.
Thanks to Ben, who was next to him now and was taking all the glares from his former group, Marcus Doyle felt like he knew these people personally.
Lee, arm bandaged, face careful, shielding the woman behind him.
Carley, pale, steady, possibly pregnant, and being shielded by her man, could be a possible replacement for Talia.
Lilly, rifle slung, face stern and in a scowl. She was a former military, based on Ben's stories and the way she walked, and another possible replacement for Talia, both in bed and in command if he could break her. Though she wasn't as pretty as the other women were in their group.
Mark, watching positions the way soldiers watched positions, or had learned after the outbreak.
Larry, on his feet, the father of the vet woman, and a possible problem due to his stubbornness, even as they came stood up in a line in front of him in surrender.
And Clementine last. The youngest of the group now, and the prettiest due to her age and being the healthiest-looking one.
Marcus Doyle looked at her for a moment and then looked at the farm, and something in his expression shifted that was very brief and very specific, the expression of someone revising an estimate upward.
"Thank you," he said. Warm. "That was the right call."
"What do you want?" Lee's voice. Even.
"Let's not rush." Doyle looked at the farmhouse, at the yard, at the quality of a functioning property in a world where everything else was destroyed. "This is a good place." He said it the way a man said it when he was already thinking about furniture arrangements. "Running water. Generator. The soil here is good." He looked at them. "Someone put real work into this." He walked up to them, his men following after as they aimed at the group. The five that had been on the back were signaled to come to them.
"The family that ran it is dead," Lilly said.
"I know." He said it pleasantly. "I knew them." He looked at the house again. "We had a little bit of a problem." A pause. "Past tense, now."
"We figured," Lee said.
Marcus looked at him. "I thought you might." Something moved in his expression, a brief, genuine reassessment. He looked at the statues behind the farmhouse, their shapes still in the fading light. His eyes stayed on them for a moment longer than everything else.
"Those new?" he said, to no one specifically.
Nobody answered.
"Interesting," Marcus said, pleasantly.
He looked at Ben, who had been standing slightly closer to the Save-Lots people and apart from the motel group since they'd come out, occupying the no-man's-land geography of someone who had crossed a line and understood it couldn't be crossed back.
Lee looked at Ben with a glare that could melt steel, but it was much worse from Lilly and Larry, as Ben could literally feel them, whimpering to himself and hunching even further into himself.
"You told him everything," Lee said.
"I-" Ben's hands came up slightly and then dropped. "I tried to help. I came back here to help, and he-" He stopped, his voice going up at the edges, the pitch of something that had been rehearsed sounding different out loud than it had in his head. "You would have shot me. You were going to shoot me."
"I wish he had," Lee said, and looked at Larry.
Larry's jaw was set. He didn't apologize, and he didn't explain, and he didn't look away, because he wasn't a man who did those things, which was both his greatest flaw and the reason he was still standing.
"See! That's exactly why! You all treat me like I am nothing," Ben snapped, his eyes teary. His voice had found some semblance of anger and justification for all this. "Everything I did-" He stopped. "Every single thing I tried, it was wrong. It wasn't enough. It was never-"
Ben looked at Clementine's face and found what he was looking for, which was the worst thing that could have happened to him.
Not contempt. Not the flat, dismissive anger that Lee had or Lilly's fury that promised him torture before death. What Clementine's face had was quieter and worse than that.
Pity.
The careful pity of someone who understood exactly what had happened to you and was sorry about it and was also never going to forgive you for what you did with it.
"Ben," she said.
Her voice was quiet. The tone that Clark would have recognized, and Marcus Doyle was about to learn.
Ben looked at her.
"Is that what this is?" she said. "All of it." She looked at Doyle's men, at the weapons pointed at people she loved, at Larry's face, Lilly's face, Lee's face, and Carley's worry. "You wanted someone to tell you that you mattered?"
Ben's jaw worked. "You all made me feel like I didn't."
"I know," she said. The words were genuine, which made them worse than anything else she could have said. "I know that's how it felt. And I'm sorry for how it felt, Ben. I'm sorry nobody told you." She held his eyes, and her voice was steady and soft and completely without cruelty. "If all you wanted was a hug-"
Ben's face opened slightly, the involuntary unguarding of someone who had been offered something they'd stopped expecting.
"-I would give you one right now," she said.
He started to nod.
"And then," she said, and her voice changed tone, a drop in temperature even when they were outside, all at once and completely, "I would have slit your throat and watched you drown in your own blood."
The farmyard went very quiet.
Ben's face had stopped moving. His mouth was open.
Doyle's mouth had dropped to the floor, eyes wide with shock and surprise.
It took a moment to really take in what she had said, and then it resolved into a laugh. A long, genuine laugh of a man who had been surprised into it, sapping his strength to that point that he had to put his hands on his knees to hold himself steady as he laughed.
"Damn, girl!" he said, to no one in particular, as he kept laughing, his sides hurting now.
But after a while, he calmed down, letting out a sigh. "Ahhhh. That felt good." He said to no one in particular. Clementine didn't look at him, didn't give him an ounce of her attention as she glared at Ben, who was worse than Lilly and Larry combined. Instead, they were now staring at their youngest member in surprise, and so were others.
"I'm disgusted," she said. "By you. By your face. By every good memory I have that has you in it, because now when I remember them, you're in them, and I have to know that this-" She looked at the farmyard, at the men with their weapons, at Lilly's face and Larry's, at Carley's hand pressed flat to her side. "-was always in there somewhere. Waiting."
"Clem-" Ben's voice had gone very small.
"Don't." The word came out like a door closing. "Don't say my name. Just hearing it makes me gag." She tore her eyes from her former friend, spitting to the side in disgust, which was Ben's final blow, his hand going to the pocket that had the gun Talia had given him.
Talia's hand shot out and closed around Ben's wrist before the gun had cleared the pocket.
"No," she said. One word, flat, the tone of someone correcting a bad habit in a junior employee.
Ben's hand went still.
"Not yet," Talia said, quieter, and steered his hand back to his side with the firm efficiency of someone who had done similar things many times and found them tedious. She didn't look at him while she did it. She was watching Clementine.
Marcus Doyle had straightened up from his laughing, wiping the corner of his eye with one finger. He looked at Clementine with the expression of someone who had upgraded their opinion of someone.
"I like you," he said again. He meant it differently this time.
Clementine didn't look at him.
"Unfortunately," Marcus said, settling back into his easy tone, "we still need to have our conversation." He looked at the group, moving from face to face with the unhurried attention of someone who had been reading people for a long time and was still finding it interesting, which is why he let Lilly still have her rifle and others their weapons- or whatever was left of them that wasn't in the RV.
"What do you want?" Lee asked.
"I want the farm," Marcus said, easily. "I want everything in it. I want the generators and the fuel and the water and whatever's inside that you haven't used yet." He gestured at the yard with one hand, the easy gesture of a man pointing at what was already his. "I want all of that." He paused. "And I want to not be bored. The world ended, and one of the things it took with it was decent entertainment, and I find that genuinely tragic." He looked at Clementine again with a flirty smile. "You're the best entertainment I've had in months."
"Get to the rest of it," Lilly said.
Marcus looked at her. He took his time about it.
"The women stay," he said. "The men-" He shrugged, pleasantly. "That depends on how useful they decide to be."
"And if we say no," Lee said, Lilly gripped her rifle tightly, which was answered by the men around them to put their fingers on the trigger.
Marcus smiled.
"Nobody says no," he said. "Not really. They say no, and then they watch something happen, and then they reconsider." He tilted his head slightly. "I find it speeds things up considerably if we skip that middle part. But-" He shrugged again. "-some people need the demonstration."
"What does that mean?" Carley's voice, careful.
"It means-" Marcus began.
"It means he's going to kill one of us," Larry said.
The farmyard went quiet.
Not the silence of surprise. The silence of confirmation. Larry said it the way he said most things, with the blunt accuracy of a man who had stopped seeing the point in dressing things up, and it landed in the middle of the farmyard and sat there. Marcus Doyle looked at him with something that was close to amusement
"You're smart," Marcus said.
"Fuck you."
Marcus's mouth twitched just a little.
"It doesn't have to be someone here," he continued. He was looking at Larry, but his voice was directed at all of them, the tone of someone managing an audience rather than a conversation. "I'm reasonable. I'm not a monster." He said it in the voice of a man who had said it many times and had long since stopped wondering whether it was true. "I'm just-" He spread his hands. "-clear. About what happens when people don't cooperate."
"Why are you doing this?" Mark asked, and Marcus sighed tiredly. But he still spoke, wasting every few seconds to talk because he liked his own voice.
"I want a kingdom," he said. "Which is what any man worth anything wants in a world that has gone back to its base state." He was easy about it, the ease of someone saying something he'd thought through thoroughly and arrived at from first principles. "A kingdom requires subjects. It requires-" He paused, finding the right frame. "-continuation. Legacy." He smiled. "And it requires someone worth building it for."
The farmyard was very quiet.
"And you've appointed yourself king," Lee said.
"Someone has to," Marcus said. "Might as well be the person who saw it coming." He looked at the farm. "I've been building toward this since about three weeks after everything fell apart. While other people were mourning and panicking and running, I was thinking." He said it without arrogance, which was somehow worse than arrogance would have been. "The world doesn't reward feeling things. It rewards building things. So I built."
"You built a group of bandits who only take and take," Lilly said.
"I built a community," Marcus said, pleasantly. "The methods are-" He tilted his hand back and forth, the gesture of someone acknowledging a gray area. "-negotiable. The goal isn't. And even then, Lee Everett." He walked away from Larry, coming face to face with him.
"Weren't you a teacher of history? He was a history teacher, wasn't he, Ben?" Marcus asked. Before Ben could even nod, he continued. "So, tell us about a kingdom, let's say… Our very own homeland, the United States of America. Tell me how they conquered the land we're on, please."
Lee glared back.
"No? What about Canada? Mexico? England, France, or any country in the world." He turned back to Lilly.
"You were military. You were probably deployed as well to other places, like the Middle East. Tell me, how many did you kill for the interest of the United States, even after our country was established?"
"This is different." Lee tried, but Marcus chuckled.
"Really? So you're saying no kingdom had build their foundation on blood and corpses?" Marcus shook his head as Lee's scowl went deeper. "I understand it is hard to see things from my point of view. But you see, I have to do this."
"You don't have to do anything," Mark said.
Marcus looked at him with the expression of a man who found sincerely held beliefs endearing in the way that things were endearing when they were also wrong.
"That's what people say," he said, "when they are simply stuck to get by. To just survive… They don't think of the alternatives." He turned back toward the house, walking a slow arc that took him past Larry, past Lilly, past the position of his own men without looking at them, the ease of a man conducting an inspection of something he already owned. He stopped with his back to them, facing the farmhouse. "So was I." He was quiet for a moment. "The difference between us is what we decided to do after it."
"I decided that I want to build a new world. For that, I need resources, men to do the hard work, and women to…" He chuckled to himself, "to keep the men in line."
"I won't be cruel and take your women from you, if that's what you're worried about." Marcus offered with a shrug, walking back to the group.
He looked at Mark.
"Military?" he said.
Mark said nothing.
"I thought so." Marcus looked at Lilly. "Both of you." He said it with the appreciation of someone noting a detail that confirmed an earlier hypothesis. "That's useful. I like useful people." He paused. "Less useful is when useful people decide their loyalty is to a situation that no longer exists." He tilted his head. "I'm willing to be patient about that. People come around."
"We won't," Lilly said.
"You haven't had enough time yet," Marcus said, pleasantly.
Larry made a sound.
And then, as if he remembered something, he pointed a finger to the sky. "Ah."
Talia, waiting for that, shoved a trance Ben to Marcus. "Now."
He stumbled just a little, but Marcus caught him, sending Talia a playful glare, before dusting Ben's shoulder, while the kid looked down with stars in his eyes at finally hearing the man's goal.
"Now, Larry." Marcus turned, a hand still on Ben's shoulder, the pleasantry on the man's face dimming just a little. "I saw what you did with my new friend, Ben, here."
"That was extremely rude."
Larry growled.
"Especially when he just wanted to let you know about what happened to the RV."
"You think we care about that traitor?!" Larry shot back, angered further, his chest pain coming back just a little.
Meanwhile, Clementine looked around at the men's smiles and whispers to each other, slowly relaxing. Inwardly, she commanded the golems to get ready to cause a distraction, sensing the situation going in a bad direction.
But before they could do anything-
The woman's radio came to life, a voice of panic silencing the entire farm.
"HELP! HELP! THE VARIANT FROM TERMINUS! HE'S-"
The radio cut out.
Not the gradual fade of a signal going out of range. The abrupt, mid-sentence silence of a transmission that had stopped.
Nobody moved for a second.
Then the forest to the north erupted with gunfire and screams of terror that they could hear all the way from the farm, before the gunfire was silenced.
Talia's radio crackled again.
Static.
She immediately ordered everyone to prepare to kill the variant, while Clementine and the others huddled together, back to back. "Hey, you!" Marcus pointed at the closest man with a rifle and then at the motel group. "Keep an eye on them. If that woman raises her weapon, kill her!"
"How fucking stupid are you?!" Lilly shot back, her eyes frantically searching the tree lines as well with the others. But Marcus only glanced at her for a moment before ignoring her. Right now, he had to deal with a variant that was at least ten feet tall and, worst of all, could probably summon a horde to them like a screamer-
TRA-TRA-Tr-
The shots were cut off in the middle, as more screams came out of the forest before a terrified young man, covered in blood, ran to them!
"HELP!" His voice was hoarse, his face could barely be seen as it was red, and every two seconds, he would look back in horror, even stumbling every ten feet.
"HELP! HE'S RIGHT! HE'S RIGHT BEHIND ME!"
"Cover him!" At Marcus's order, five men quickly walked up to the bloodied kid-
SWISH
A bolt lodged itself in the head of a man, the closest to another tree line.
===============
AN: Yooo, damn, just saw the word count. almost 7k (that's 6 and half chapters webnovel readers. You better be grateful.)
Anyway, this chapter, I wanted to try to have a genuine villain. My first ever villain written. I tried my best to make sure he fits the world view and his goal should be logical.
Cause a logical villain is more dangerious than a powerful one.
I hope I did a good job. You might be thinking why does the monologue go for so long, but there's a suble hint before the group goes out. That they need to buy time. So, the motel group are just listening and letting Marcus Doyle talk and talk. I tried to show Clementine's disgust at Ben's reason to defect and all and hopefully, I did good there as well.
Next chapter, it'll be back to Clark's POV and why he heard gun shots when there weren't really one at the farm.