Chapter 3: The Quarry
[Railroad Tracks, South of Atlanta — Late October 2010, Dusk]
The tracks cut through Atlanta's underbelly like a scar—rusted rails flanked by gravel beds and chain-link fences that separated the line from the warehouses and loading docks on either side. The last of the daylight hung in a copper band above the western tree line, and I walked the ties with the steel pipe in my hand and my ears tuned to everything.
Walkers on the tracks were sparse. Most had migrated toward the city center where sound and movement concentrated them, leaving the industrial fringe almost empty. Almost. Twice I spotted lone figures in the middle distance—one standing motionless in a loading bay, another slumped against a signal box—and gave them wide clearance.
The danger sense stayed quiet. A good sign, or a terrifying one. Sixty percent reliability meant four times out of ten it wouldn't fire at all, and I had no way to know which times those were. So I walked alert, head on a swivel, and treated every shadow as hostile until proven otherwise.
The sporting goods store had been a bust. Picked clean except for a rack of novelty keychains and a display of tennis balls. I'd grabbed a drawstring gym bag from behind the counter—nylon, bright orange, not exactly tactical—and loaded it with the Coca-Colas and a half-empty bottle of Gatorade I'd found wedged under a collapsed shelf. The pipe went in too, freed from my belt, and I carried the bag slung over one shoulder.
Night arrived the way it does in Georgia in October: fast and thick. The tree line swallowed the last light, and the tracks became a dark corridor between walls of pine and oak. I pulled the drawstring bag tighter against my back and moved by feel, setting each foot on the rail and following its line.
My body held up better than expected. Glenn's frame was built for this—light, efficient, with the kind of low-center-of-gravity balance that made quiet movement natural. My old body had been thirty pounds heavier and complained about stairs. This one ate miles like it had been doing them daily, which—given the pizza delivery job—it probably had.
The quarry access road appeared around midnight. A gravel turnoff from the two-lane highway that the tracks paralleled, marked by a faded sign reading Bellwood Quarry — No Trespassing. I stopped at the tree line and sat with my back against a pine trunk.
Dawn. I'd approach at dawn. Walking into a camp of armed, frightened survivors in the dark was a good way to catch a bullet from someone too scared to ask questions.
I slept sitting up, the pipe across my knees, and woke every time the wind shifted.
---
[Quarry Camp — Late October 2010, Early Morning]
Smoke first. Then the smell of something cooking—beans, maybe, or canned stew heated over an open flame. My stomach twisted so hard it ached.
The camp materialized through the trees as I approached from the east, keeping to the gravel road with my hands visible. An RV—Dale's RV, the one I'd seen a thousand times on screen—sat at the center of a loose cluster of tents and vehicles. A Cherokee. A station wagon. Laundry strung between poles. A firepit with coals still glowing from the night's watch.
A woman hung clothes on the line. A man sat in a folding chair near the RV, cleaning a rifle. Kids' voices carried from somewhere behind the tents—high-pitched, the kind of sound that meant safety hadn't fully died yet.
I stepped out of the tree line onto open ground and the man with the rifle saw me immediately.
Shane Walsh moved the way I expected—explosive, efficient, rifle up and shouldered in the time it took me to raise my hands. He was bigger in person than he'd looked on television. Broader through the chest and shoulders. The kind of build that made you understand why people deferred to him.
"Don't move!"
His voice carried across the camp like a starter pistol. The woman at the clothesline—Lori, I knew, but couldn't show that I knew—grabbed a boy by the shoulder and pulled him behind the Cherokee. Carl. Small, still soft around the jaw. A kid who hadn't killed anything yet.
"Hands! Let me see 'em!"
My hands were already up, fingers spread. "I'm alone. No weapons except a pipe in my bag."
"Drop the bag. Slow."
I slid the orange gym bag off my shoulder and set it on the gravel. Shane advanced with the rifle trained on my chest, and behind him a second figure emerged from the RV—older, white-haired, wearing a bucket hat that would've been funny if his eyes weren't so serious.
Dale Horvath. The group's moral compass. The man who saw everything from the roof of that RV and kept his mouth shut about half of it because he believed people deserved the chance to be better than their worst decisions.
"Shane," Dale said, stepping down the RV's folding stairs with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. "Take it easy. He's just a kid."
"Kid could be bait." Shane didn't lower the rifle. His jaw worked sideways like he was chewing something bitter. "Who are you? Where'd you come from?"
"Glenn. Glenn Rhee." My voice came out steady, which surprised me. My heart was trying to escape through my ribs. "I delivered pizzas in Atlanta before everything went to hell. I've been hiding in the city for weeks. Saw your smoke yesterday from a rooftop downtown."
"You walked here from Atlanta? Alone?" Suspicion poured off Shane like heat from asphalt. His eyes moved from my face to my hands to the bag on the ground and back, cataloguing threats.
"I know the city. Every shortcut, every back alley. Delivered to every neighborhood inside the perimeter. It's why I'm still alive."
A beat. Shane's trigger finger stayed indexed along the guard, not on the trigger itself—discipline, training. He'd been a cop. The stance was textbook.
"You got bit?"
"No."
"Lift your shirt. Turn around."
I did. The morning air hit my stomach and back, and I turned a slow circle with my arms out. No bites. No scratches except the healing scrapes on my palms, which had closed to thin pink lines overnight.
"He's clean." Dale had moved closer, studying me with an expression I'd learn to recognize over the coming weeks—curiosity wrapped in caution, served with the quiet patience of a man who'd rather listen than lecture. "Son, when's the last time you ate?"
"I don't remember."
That was almost true. The Coca-Cola and Gatorade were calories, technically, but my stomach had been running on empty since I'd woken up, and before that—well, whatever the original Glenn had eaten before I arrived, it wasn't sustaining me now.
Dale nodded once, like that settled something. He turned to Shane. "He's half-starved and he walked through Atlanta alone to get here. That's either brave or crazy, and either way, he deserves breakfast."
Shane's rifle lowered two inches. Not down. Not safe. Just... pending.
"You stay where I can see you," he said. "You don't go near the women or kids until I say otherwise. You don't touch a weapon. You pull anything—anything—and I will put you down. We clear?"
"Crystal."
---
Other faces appeared as the morning settled in. I catalogued them the way I'd catalogued the Atlanta streets—by landmark, by function, by threat level—except these were people, and the memories attached to them were heavier than geography.
T-Dog—Theodore Douglas—came over and shook my hand without being prompted. Big man, genuine grip, the kind of person who offered trust before requiring it. "You really know Atlanta? Like, the real streets, not the highway?"
"Every one. Two years of deliveries."
He exchanged a glance with Morales, a compact man with a worried face, whose wife and two kids watched from behind their tent flap. "We've been talking about supply runs into the city. Nobody knows the layout well enough to go deep."
"I do."
That landed. I could see the calculation in T-Dog's eyes—useful—and filed it. Usefulness was currency in this world. The more I spent, the deeper I'd embed.
Andrea stood near the firepit with her arm around Amy, her younger sister. Amy was blonde, young, alive—and I knew, with the knife-precise certainty of my enhanced memory, that she would die in this camp during a walker attack. Bitten through the neck. Bled out in her sister's arms while Andrea screamed.
I looked away before my face could betray anything.
Carol sat on a cooler near the Peletier tent, peeling something into a bowl. Her movements were careful and contained, the way people move when they're used to being hit for taking up too much space. Ed wasn't visible, but his presence hung over her like a stain. Sophia sat beside her mother—twelve, small, brown-haired, alive.
She'd stay alive. That was a promise I made to myself, right there, standing in gravel with an empty stomach and a cop's rifle recently pointed at my chest. Sophia Peletier was not going into that barn.
Dale offered me a seat near the RV and brought me a bowl of heated canned stew. Beef and vegetable, the generic kind with too much salt and not enough meat. I held the bowl in both hands and the warmth seeped through the metal into my palms, into the healing scrapes, into the exhaustion living behind my eyes.
The first bite almost broke me. Hot food. Real, hot food. Not warm soda from a vending machine. Not adrenaline and grit. Something that somebody had heated over a flame for the purpose of feeding another person. The simple, stupid miracle of a warm meal.
My eyes burned. I turned it into a cough, ducked my head, and kept eating.
"Slow down, son." Dale settled into the folding chair beside me, hands folded over his belly, hat tipped back. "Nobody's going to take it from you."
"Right. Sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry for." He studied me the way he studied everything—with a patience that implied all the time in the world, even when the world had very little left. "Pizza delivery, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Must've been good at it. Surviving alone in that city."
"I was fast. Knew which doors to avoid." I scraped the bottom of the bowl. "That's about it."
Dale made a small sound—not quite a laugh, not quite agreement. The kind of sound that meant I hear what you're saying, and I hear what you're not saying, and I'll wait.
Shane watched from across the camp, arms folded, rifle slung over his shoulder. The suspicion hadn't left his face. It wouldn't, not for a while. Shane Walsh was a man who trusted patterns, and a stranger walking out of a dead city didn't fit any pattern that made him comfortable.
That was fine. I didn't need Shane to trust me. I needed him to tolerate me long enough for me to prove I was useful, and I needed to be inside this camp when Rick Grimes showed up in a week, because everything—everything—started with Rick.
Carol appeared at my elbow without a sound. She held out a second bowl of stew, steam curling off the surface. "You look like you need another."
"Thank you." I took it. Her fingers were thin, her nails bitten short, and a bruise showed faint yellow at the edge of her left sleeve where the fabric rode up. I didn't look at it. "I appreciate it."
She dipped her chin and retreated. Sophia watched me from behind the tent, one eye visible, the other hidden. I gave her a small wave. She didn't wave back, but she didn't hide further, either.
The sun climbed. The camp settled into its morning rhythm—chores divided, water hauled, firewood gathered. I sat where Shane could see me, ate what Dale brought, and let myself be watched. Let them take my measure.
A sleeping bag appeared by the RV sometime around midday. Dale's doing—he'd pulled it from the RV's storage compartment and laid it on a tarp without comment. I unrolled it and sat on top of it and stared at the quarry below the ridge, where the water lay flat and green and still, and I started building a map in my head.
Not of Atlanta. Of the future.
Rick would arrive in a week. The camp attack would come not long after. Amy would die. Jim would get bitten. They'd go to the CDC, and Jenner would tell them the truth about the infection—everyone carries it—and then the building would try to kill them all.
After that: the highway. The herd. Sophia running into the woods. Hershel's farm. The barn. Shane's unraveling. The prison. The Governor. Terminus. Negan.
My memory unspooled it all in merciless high-definition, and I let it play, because the only weapon better than a pipe or a gun in this world was knowing what came next.
I finished the second bowl of stew, set it aside, and watched Shane pace the perimeter with his shotgun.
Six days until Rick. A lot could happen in six days.
I reached into the orange gym bag, found the last warm Coca-Cola, and cracked it open.
Time to earn my place.
Note:
Please give good reviews and power stones itrings more people and more people means more chapters?
My Patreon is all about exploring 'What If' timelines, and you can get instant access to chapters far ahead of the public release.
Choose your journey:
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0