Rick and Team 2 moved low along the fence line, weapons up, the sound of gunfire and burning wood carrying over the rooftops from the direction of the front gate. Behind him, six fighters from Hope 101 fanned out in a loose line, boots silent on frost-hardened dirt, every one of them holding their breath like the air itself might give them away.
The first house they passed was empty. The second wasn't.
A man suddenly burst out the side door with a large machete already raised, half-dressed, his eyes wild with the kind of panic that came from waking up to explosions instead of birdsong. He didn't shout a warning. He didn't ask who they were. He just charged at them like a madman without any warning.
Bang!
Oscar dropped him before he could get near them. One round, clean, and the man folded backward into the dirt without another sound.
"Movement, second floor," someone hissed, and Rick's eyes snapped up in time to see a curtain twitch behind a cracked window.
"Hold," Rick said, low, and raised a hand.
The curtain moved again. A shape emerged — not a rifle, not a weapon at all, just a woman with both hands raised, shaking so badly the motion barely looked voluntary.
"Don't shoot! Please, don't—" Her voice cracked. "There's kids in here!"
She had made herself visible, which was the last thing anyone hiding during an attack should do, but the panic in her face made it obvious she hadn't been thinking clearly.
Rick lowered his own rifle a fraction, enough to signal the others to hold. "Get down here, and don't even think of doing anything funny."
He signaled, and two fighters rushed toward the front door. They stopped just short of it. Two suppressed shots punched into the frame around the latch, splintering the wood and tearing the hardware loose. The second fighter kicked the damaged door open.
Bam!
The two charged inside and not long after, a frightened woman came down the stairs half-dragging a boy while carrying a toddler, the boy no older than eight, the other barely three, both of them were crying while the toddler looked at them with curiosity in her eyes. Rick felt something twist in his chest that he didn't have time to examine right now. Glenn moved forward with a roll of cable ties, gentler than the moment probably called for, and got her wrists bound loose enough not to bruise.
"You're not going to be hurt," Rick told her, and meant it, even with the gunfire still hammering somewhere behind them. "Sit tight. Somebody'll come for you when this is over. Don't do anything stupid and get yourself killed."
After his warning, they resumed moving.
Two more armed men came around the corner of a supply shed a block later, rifles slung but not raised, jogging toward the sound of the fight without any idea they'd already crossed into enemy territory.
"Drop it!" Glenn shouted, his voice cracking with the strain of trying to sound like a man who did this often.
The nearer one froze and carefully let his rifle fall without a fight. The second man hesitated, his weapon still slung across his chest, eyes darting between the six guns now leveled at him like he was doing the math and not liking the answer.
"Last chance!" Rick barked. "Drop it! Last warning!"
The man's hand twitched toward the strap — not dropping it, reaching for it — and Oscar put a round into the dirt a foot from his boot before he could finish the motion. The crack of it and the spray of frozen earth against his shins seemed to shock the sense back into him. He flinched hard, and both hands quickly shot up.
"Don't! Don't, I surrender, I surrend—"
"Zip-tie both of them," Rick said, already moving past, some of the tension bleeding out of his shoulders. "Keep going."
By the time they reached the edge of the center of the community, they'd tied up six more, and only once more had it come down to a warning shot — a kid, maybe nineteen, who'd raised his hands the instant a round kicked up gravel by his feet and hadn't stopped shaking since. Rick still hadn't stopped moving long enough to feel any of it, but some small, quiet part of him was grateful the tally hadn't grown the way it easily could have.
Philip Blake was with his "daughter" when the world outside his window came apart.
He'd been sitting on a small sofa in the small back room he kept locked at all times, the one nobody else was permitted to enter, speaking softly to the pale, milky-eyed thing chained to the far wall in a dress that had once been someone's Sunday best. Her jaw worked slowly, hungrily, at nothing, the way it always did, and Philip had been telling her — the way he told her every morning, whether she understood a word of it or not — that today was going to be a good day for Woodbury.
Kaboom!
The Governor was about to say something when the sound of an explosion interrupted him. The floor trembled beneath his knees. Dust sifted down from the rafters, and a heartbeat later, the roar of it rolled through the walls, deep and wrong, followed immediately by the higher, sharper crack of gunfire.
Philip was on his feet before he'd finished processing what he'd heard.
For one second, he couldn't understand what he was hearing.
Then came the screams and gunfire, and his face finally changed.
"No — no, not now." He grabbed the thin chain and hauled the walker back toward the closet with more force than he meant to use, ignoring the low groan it gave in protest, forcing the door shut over its reaching hands. He turned the lock with fingers that weren't quite steady. "Stay. Stay there. I'll come back."
He didn't wait to see if it obeyed. It never did anything but exist, patient and empty, and right now that patience was the only mercy he had time to offer it.
By the time he reached the stairwell, the gunfire had swallowed the whole eastern half of the settlement, and smoke was already curling under the front door.
Team Three moved fast through the chaos, hugging the shadows between buildings, and twice in the space of a hundred yards they passed groups of Woodbury's own people running the opposite direction — toward the noise, toward the fight, exactly like Michael had said they would.
Nobody looked at them twice.
"Come on! They need bodies on the wall!" a man shouted as he sprinted past, not even breaking stride, apparently assuming four more armed men jogging in the same general direction meant four more guns for the fight.
Tom almost laughed, catching himself at the last second and turning it into a cough instead. Daryl shot him a look that could've stripped paint.
Jack said nothing. He kept his eyes forward, counting doorways, counting corners, until the alley opened out into a wider street and he caught sight of exactly who they'd been sent to find.
Martinez stood in the open, rifle in one hand, shouting orders at a knot of frightened militia trying to form a line that kept collapsing every time someone new panicked and bolted for cover. He was good at it — Jack could see that even from here, the calm authority cutting through the noise, men steadying under his voice the way men steady under someone who sounds like he knows what he's doing even when he doesn't.
Jack raised a fist. The rest of the team dropped low behind a stack of rusted barrels.
He eased down onto one knee beside a leaning fence post, rifle coming up slow, breath going out of him in a controlled, measured stream the way thirty years and two wars had taught him to breathe before a shot that mattered.
Through the scope, Martinez's chest filled the reticle, turned three-quarters away, exposed for exactly as long as it took to give one more order.
Jack exhaled the last of his breath and held it.
Martinez had almost gotten the line steady. Almost. Three more seconds and he'd have had bodies filling the gap at the barricade, rifles up, something resembling order pulled back out of the panic.
He never got the three seconds.
The jolt hit him low in the back, a hard, distant sort of pain that didn't quite register as pain at first — more like being shoved, hard, by someone he couldn't see. He staggered a half-step forward and looked down without understanding why he was looking down, and that was when he saw it: a dark stain already spreading fast across the front of his shirt, blooming outward from a hole that hadn't been there a second ago.
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
The world tilted sideways, sound dropping away into a dull ringing hum, the panicked shouting around him fading into something distant and unimportant. His legs went first — a slow, creeping numbness climbing up from his knees — and he folded onto them without ever really deciding to, the rifle slipping from fingers that no longer understood how to hold anything.
For one strange, suspended moment he was still upright, kneeling in the middle of the street like a man in prayer, staring down at his own blood pooling dark against the pavement.
Then his upper body followed, and Martinez hit the ground and didn't move again.