The breach in the wall had gone from a hole to an open wound in the last few minutes, and Michael was the one who widened it.
He came through first, boots crunching over shattered glass, burning tires and broken fragments of woods still smoldering from the last of the Molotovs. Two defenders scrambled to shoot him but never finished the motion — Michael put them both down before either of them could pull the trigger.
"Move in and fan out!" he shouted back through the gap, and Team One surged in behind him, T-Dog and the rest fanning out into what had been Woodbury's front line a minute earlier and was now just open, contested ground.
A shot suddenly rang out from somewhere.
One crack, sharp and clean.
Michael quickly ran to the side and took cover from behind a wrecked car, and it was in that half-second of stillness that he saw it — a thin column of white smoke rising from somewhere further up the main road, curling into the gray sky, distinct from the black, oily smoke still pouring off the burning buildings behind him.
Michael couldn't figure out where it came from that single shot, but when he heard the following gunshots from somewhere other than their position, he quickly figured out the person behind it.
Jack.
Jack had been waiting almost twenty minutes for exactly this moment, and when Team One finally broke the wall, he watched it happen from above like the tide finally turning — defenders abandoning the barricade in twos and threes, the whole formation buckling inward, and in the middle of that collapse, Philip Blake suddenly stepped back into view from behind the van, counter attacking while shouting something at his own men that nobody was listening to anymore.
Jack didn't wait for a better angle. He wasn't going to get one.
He exhaled, steadied, and fired!
Bang!
Philip twisted at the last possible second — some instinct or dumb luck pulling him half a step to the side — and the round that should have taken him center-mass caught his shoulder instead, spinning him hard into the ground with a cry.
Philip survived, but he was down and bleeding, and for one long second, completely exposed.
Jack cycled the bolt, already lining up the second shot when someone suddenly pulled Philip into cover behind the van, followed by a canister thrown to the ground and burst into a white smoke.
A second one followed it a heartbeat later, and within seconds the whole intersection had disappeared into a churning wall of smoke, thick enough that Jack lost Philip entirely, thick enough that even the van vanished into it. Someone had been standing close enough, calm enough, to pull Philip back into cover and throw smoke grenades to mess his rhythm— someone Jack never got a clear look at, but knew it was the same militia fighter that convinced Philip to retreat from the wall.
"Damn it." Jack held the position anyway, scope tracking the edge of the smoke, waiting for a shape to stumble out of it.
That was when the sound of gunshots rang from below, and he was under fire.
Below, Daryl had heard the shot too — heard it, and half a second later heard Shumpert's voice crack out across the street.
"Tower! He's in the tower!"
Whatever quiet had been holding the block together broke apart entirely. Shumpert's team opened up on the water tower's catwalk, and Daryl was already moving, dropping low at the shattered second-floor window with his rifle braced against the frame.
"Kill them!" he shouted, and sprayed bullets towards Shumpert's position.
Tom's Thompson answered a heartbeat later, spraying wide from the window beside him, forcing two of them back behind a parked car below. For a few seconds the exchange was close and ugly and even — four against two, but nobody quite able to find a clean angle from their positions.
While Tom and Daryl gave their all to cover Jack, Baldwin had other plans in mind.
He shifted to the far end of the window, rifle already up, and where Daryl and Tom were burning through magazines trying to keep heads down, Baldwin fired only when he had something worth firing at. The Ruger cracked twice, quiet compared to the Thompson's roar, and two of Shumpert's men dropped within seconds of each other — one through the throat, one through the temple, both died not knowing what hit them.
Shumpert broke for cover, firing wild over his shoulder, and Baldwin tracked him through the scope without rushing, waiting for the half-second gap between one stride and the next.
The following shot ended Shumpert.
There was no pity in Baldwin's eyes, and like a machine, he eliminated the last remaining enemy.
"Jesus," Tom breathed, lowering the Thompson, staring down at the street where all four men now lay still.
Daryl lowered his own rifle slowly. He was looking at Baldwin, whose expression remained unchanged from the beginning, bored.
"You good?" Tom asked, still catching his breath.
Daryl didn't answer right away. "Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, I'm good."
He suddenly heard a "thud" and by the time he turned back around, Baldwin was already gone.
No word to either of them, no explanation, just an empty space by the window where he'd been standing a moment ago. Daryl rushed towards the window and leaned out, scanning the street below, but there was no sign of him any longer.
"The hell?" Tom said, looking around like Baldwin might still be somewhere in the room. "Where'd he go?"
Daryl didn't have an answer. But he had a guess.
The deal had been simple enough — a car, gear, and his freedom the moment the objective was neutralized, straight from Baldwin's mouth to Michael's, agreed on days ago. Daryl remembered Michael had never once mentioned honoring the second half of it, and if there was one thing Daryl had learned about the man leading them today, it was that he doesn't easily make promises that would disadvantage their side.
Maybe Baldwin had picked up on that too. Maybe that was reason enough not to wait around and find out.
By the time the smoke cleared, there was nothing left in their location, but a scattering of blood and Philip's dropped rifle, abandoned in the street. There was a blood trail, but it didn't lead far — a few drops here, a smear there, and then nothing. Michael and Merle followed it as far as it went and came back with nothing.
He was gone, and whoever had pulled The Governor out of there, had planned it well.
"He got away," Merle said, more disgusted than surprised.
"For now." Michael keyed his radio. "Jack. Report. What's your position?"
There was a pause before Jack's voice came through, breathing hard, still moving. "Winged him. Center mass, but it was dumb luck that he twisted at the last second. He's alive, and he's got help — it was someone who probably noticed me and tried to pull him away." A short pause. "We also encountered some resistance at our position, but Daryl and the rest handled it. We're at the water tower, southwest corner. Some kind of hardware store nearby, if that helps."
"Copy that. Sweep the area and we'll regroup there." Michael lowered the radio, jaw tight, and looked out over the settlement — smoke rising in three or four different columns now, gunfire tapering off into scattered, isolated pockets rather than one continuous fight.
It wasn't the ending he'd wanted. But it was close enough to one he had envisioned.
There wasn't time to dwell on it. All that noise, all that fire — it would've carried for miles, and Michael had learned the hard way what a sound like that could drag out of the woods. Behind him, most of Team One had already started smothering the flames and dragging what was left of the barricade back into place, sealing the breach before anything worse shows up.
By the time the last of the fighting died down to nothing, all three teams had slowly converged on the intersection near the water tower — civilians herded along with the handful of surviving militias, zip-tied and seated in a row in the intersection near the tower. Rick's people were moving among them checking for wounds that needed tending before anything else got decided.
Michael found Daryl and Tom near the base of the hardware store, and the first thing he noticed was a man missing.
"Where's Baldwin?"
Daryl shrugged, watching Michael's face for whatever reaction that answer might get him. "Gone. Took off right after we finished off Shumpert's crew. Didn't say a word."
Michael smirked — he wasn't surprised, he was already expecting Baldwin to do this.
He didn't say anything about it. He just looked around them and the aftermath of their encounter.
"One less loose end to tie up, I guess."