Chapter 9: Hey Dumbass
[Quarry Camp — Late October 2010, Midday]
The radio crackled, and the world shifted on its axis.
I was sorting ammunition — .22 rounds on the left, shotgun shells on the right, the handful of 9mm that represented Shane's emergency reserve in the middle — when the sound cut through the camp's midday murmur like a knife through canvas. Static first, the white-noise hiss of an open frequency searching for a signal, and then a voice.
"...anybody... can anybody hear me? This is..."
More static. The voice broke apart and reformed, fragments of words surfacing through the interference like debris in floodwater.
"...trapped... downtown... tank on the main street... please, if anyone can..."
My hands stopped moving. The .22 round I'd been holding dropped into the dirt. Across the camp, heads turned toward the RV, where Dale's CB radio — left on as background noise, a habit nobody questioned because the frequencies had been dead for weeks — was producing the first human voice anyone had heard from outside the quarry since I'd arrived.
Dale reached the radio first. He fumbled with the volume knob, turning it up, and the voice came through clearer — Southern, male, breathless with the specific cadence of a man who'd been running and was now trapped and was working very hard not to sound as terrified as he was.
"...I'm in the tank. There are hundreds of them outside. I've got maybe half a magazine. If anybody's listening..."
Rick Grimes. Alive, awake, and exactly where I'd known he would be — locked inside a military tank in the middle of downtown Atlanta, surrounded by a herd that had followed the sound of his horse's screaming and his gunfire into a feeding frenzy that had turned the intersection into a killing floor.
The horse was dead. The show had never been gentle about that — Rick's arrival in Atlanta on horseback was an iconic image that ended in horror, the animal dragged down and torn apart while Rick crawled through the hatch and pulled it shut behind him. One half-magazine of ammunition. No food. No water. No plan.
And one chance.
I was across the camp before Dale finished adjusting the dial. My hand closed over the radio's handset and I keyed the transmit button with a familiarity that had nothing to do with practice and everything to do with destiny — the cheap, melodramatic, absolutely accurate word for what was happening in this moment.
"Hey, you. Dumbass."
The static held. The camp held. Dale stared at me. T-Dog, who'd been carrying water jugs from the quarry, set them down without looking away from the RV.
"Yeah, you in the tank." My voice came out steady. My heart was trying to kick through my sternum. "Cozy in there?"
A beat. Then: "...Hello? Is someone there? Who is this?"
"Name's Glenn. I'm about an hour north of your position. You want to get out of that tank alive, you're going to need to listen to me very carefully. Can you do that?"
"I— yes. Yes, I can do that."
His voice had changed. Still scared — any sane person would be — but the bottomless panic had been replaced by something with edges. Hope. The specific, dangerous hope of a drowning man who'd just been thrown a rope and didn't know yet whether the person holding the other end was strong enough to pull.
"Good. First thing — there's a hatch on the floor of the tank. Opens downward. Don't use it yet. Second — the dead ones outside, they're drawn to sound. You fired your weapon, right?"
"I — how did you know—"
"Because you're alive and in a tank and there are hundreds of them outside. Gunshots carry. They followed the noise. Right now they're in a feeding pattern — your horse, probably. That means they're distracted. That distraction won't last."
Silence. Then, quieter: "My horse. Jesus."
"I'm sorry about your horse. We'll talk about it later. Right now, I need you to tell me exactly what you can see from inside that tank. Any weapons? Grenades? A radio is good — does the tank have its own?"
---
[DALE]
Dale Horvath had been watching people for sixty-three years, and he'd never seen anyone do what Glenn Rhee was doing right now.
The kid stood at the radio like he'd been born behind it — one hand on the transmit key, the other braced against the RV's counter, body still but vibrating with a frequency that wasn't fear. Dale had seen fear in every flavor the apocalypse offered. This wasn't it. This was focus. The kind of locked-in, tunnel-vision concentration that came from people who had trained for moments like this and were finally, mercifully, being allowed to perform.
Glenn's instructions were precise. Specific. He described the layout of the streets around the tank as if he'd walked them that morning — which, Dale realized, he had. The solo scouting missions. The coded map. The routes he'd briefed the group on, keeping the detailed knowledge private. All of it crystallized into a single picture: Glenn had been preparing for this exact scenario.
Not this specific man, necessarily. But someone in that tank. Someone who needed extracting from that intersection. Glenn had mapped the escape routes, stashed supplies, memorized the walker patterns — all in the days before a voice came over the radio that he greeted with a familiarity that bordered on prescience.
Hey, you. Dumbass.
As if he'd been rehearsing the line.
Dale adjusted his hat and said nothing. Some observations were too large for the moment they occurred in. They needed space. They needed time. He would watch, and he would wait, and he would ask the right questions when the crisis had passed.
If Glenn came back alive.
---
[Glenn]
"I'm going in."
The words landed in the camp like a grenade. Shane, who'd arrived at the RV halfway through the radio exchange, crossed his arms and fixed me with the look he used when someone was about to do something he considered stupid and he wanted them to know he'd said so afterward.
"You're going into the city. Into that." He jabbed a finger toward the south, toward Atlanta, toward the swarm that had pinned a stranger in a tank. "For a man you don't know."
"He's alive and he's asking for help. That's enough."
"That's suicide is what that is." Shane's voice dropped into the low register he used for authority — the cop voice, the one that expected compliance. "We don't risk our people for strangers. That's the rule."
"Your rule." I grabbed the baseball bat from where it leaned against the RV and slung the gym bag over my shoulder. Water bottles, first aid kit, the coded map, the folding knife. Light and fast. "I know those streets. I know the store three blocks from the tank with roof access and a clear sightline. I can get him out."
"And if you can't?"
"Then you're down one pizza guy and the stranger dies in a tank. The group survives either way."
Shane's jaw worked. The calculation behind his eyes was visible — risk assessment, resource allocation, the cost-benefit arithmetic of a man who saw people as assets to be managed rather than lives to be valued. Glenn Rhee was useful. Useful enough to risk? The needle wavered.
"I'll go with him."
T-Dog stepped forward from beside the water jugs, crowbar already in his belt. He met Shane's glare without flinching. "Two's better than one. Glenn knows the city. I can carry."
"This ain't a democracy."
"Shane." Dale's voice from the RV roof. Quiet. The tone that stopped arguments not through volume but through the unassailable weight of being right. "A man is going to die in that tank. Glenn can help. Let him help."
Andrea appeared at her tent flap. "I'll go."
"No." Shane pointed at her. "Three people max, and that's already two more than should be going."
"Two's enough," I said. "T-Dog and me. We move fast, we stay quiet, we use the routes I mapped. The department store on Forsyth has roof access — we can observe the tank from there, pick our moment, guide him out through the alleys."
Shane stared at me. His hand rested on his shotgun's stock, not gripping it, just touching it — the tactile equivalent of a security blanket for a man who processed the world through controlled violence.
"You come back with a body or you come back dead," he said. "Either way, don't bring trouble to this camp."
I keyed the radio one more time. "Hey. Tank man. You still there?"
"Still here." Rick's voice was steadier now. The rope was holding. "Still got about two hundred friends outside who want to get to know me better."
"Sit tight. Don't use the gun unless they get inside. I'm coming for you."
"Who are you?"
"I told you. I'm Glenn. I'll explain the rest when you're not surrounded."
I clicked off and headed for the tree line. T-Dog fell into step beside me, crowbar over his shoulder, and behind us the camp watched with the specific silence of people witnessing someone walk toward a thing they wouldn't walk toward themselves.
Dale's hand caught my arm at the camp's edge. His grip was stronger than it looked — the wiry strength of a man who'd spent decades turning wrenches and cranking jacks.
"You come back." Not a request. An order delivered with the authority of a man who'd decided this particular young person was not allowed to die on his watch.
"I'll come back."
"I'll hold you to that."
Same words he'd used when I'd left for the solo recon three days ago. Same tone. Same grip on my arm, firm enough to feel the pulse underneath. But this time his eyes held something the first time hadn't carried — a fear that was personal, not general. Dale Horvath was afraid for me specifically, not for the abstract concept of a camp member in danger, and the distinction mattered in a way I couldn't articulate and didn't have time to examine.
I nodded. He let go.
---
[Highway South Toward Atlanta — Afternoon]
T-Dog drove. The Cherokee ate highway in gulps, weaving through the abandoned vehicles that littered the southbound lanes. Northbound was worse — a solid wall of cars from the evacuation, bumper to bumper, a monument to the traffic jam that had killed more people than the walkers it was supposed to help them escape.
"You sounded like you knew that guy," T-Dog said, eyes on the road.
"I sounded like a guy who didn't want another person to die."
"You sounded like someone who'd been waiting for that radio call."
I adjusted the bat across my knees. T-Dog was perceptive — quieter about it than Dale, less systematic than Andrea, but perceptive in the way of a man who listened because he'd spent years in spaces where not listening got you hurt.
"I've been running solo scouts in Atlanta for days. I mapped the area around that tank. I knew if anyone got stuck in that part of the city, I could get them out." All true. Framed to suggest preparation rather than foreknowledge. "When I heard the radio, the plan was already there. I just executed it."
T-Dog grunted. The sound carried a weight distribution of about seventy percent acceptance and thirty percent I'll let that slide for now.
"What if there's too many?" he asked. "What if your routes are blocked?"
"The department store has four exits. Roof access, loading dock, main entrance, and a sewer grate in the basement that connects to the drainage system two blocks south. If one's blocked, we use another. If they're all blocked—" I paused. "Then we figure it out. That's what we do."
The Atlanta skyline rose through the windshield. Same dead towers. Same broken windows. Same shapes moving behind glass on the lower floors. But the southern approach was different from the view I'd gotten on the quarry road — here, the highway cut through the industrial outskirts, and the walker density was immediately visible. Clusters of them on the overpasses. Singles shambling along the median. A group of six or seven gathered around something on the shoulder that I chose not to identify.
"Park here." I pointed to an off-ramp that fed into a commercial strip. "We go the last mile on foot. Quieter."
T-Dog pulled the Cherokee behind a delivery truck and killed the engine. The silence that followed was the specific silence of a dead city — not empty, but emptied. The sound of spaces designed for millions of voices operating with none.
I checked the bat. Checked the knife. Checked the radio — battery at sixty percent, enough for the extraction.
Somewhere in the center of that dead city, a man sat inside a tank that smelled like old death and spent brass, listening to static and waiting for a stranger named Glenn to do the impossible.
I grabbed the gym bag and stepped out of the Cherokee.
"Stay close," I told T-Dog. "Follow my lead. And when I say move, you move."
He nodded. Crowbar up. Eyes forward.
We moved into Atlanta.
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