Chapter 10: Guts
[Downtown Atlanta — Day 8 Since Transmigration, Afternoon]
The city smelled different with a herd in it.
On solo runs, Atlanta had a baseline rot — the sweet garbage stink of things left to decay in sealed buildings, overlaid with car exhaust that had nowhere to go once the ventilation patterns broke down. Manageable. Almost ignorable after the first hour.
This was different. The herd Rick had drawn with his horse and his gunfire had churned something up from the streets — a concentrated wave of decay that hit like a wall three blocks from the tank's position. T-Dog gagged beside me, pressing his forearm across his nose.
"How many you think?" he whispered.
"Hundreds. Maybe more." My danger sense had been screaming since we'd cleared the commercial strip — not the directional cold I'd catalogued during the solo recon, but a sustained, omni-directional pressure behind my eyes that made my teeth ache. Too many threats to isolate. The system was overloading, trying to point me toward individual dangers when the entire grid ahead was one massive danger. "Stay tight. I know a route that keeps us above street level for the last two blocks."
The alley I'd mapped three days ago opened on our left — a service corridor between a parking structure and an office building, narrow enough that walkers tended to bypass it. The cold eased marginally as we entered. Fewer threats in tight spaces, or at least threats that were elsewhere.
I keyed the radio. "Tank man. You still with me?"
Static. Then Rick's voice, strained but controlled: "Still here. They're pressing against the hull. I can hear them on the armor."
"How many rounds you got?"
"Maybe fifteen. And there's a bag by the dead soldier down in the hatch — looked military."
Grenades. The show memory surfaced in perfect detail: Rick's hand closing around a bag that held two grenades, a sidearm, and spare magazines. "Take the bag. Take everything in it. When I tell you to move, you pop that bottom hatch and you run north. There's an alley fifty meters straight ahead. You'll see a dumpster with a red lid. Get behind it and wait for me."
"Run through them?"
"They're feeding. Your horse—" I caught myself. Kept my voice flat. "Whatever drew them, they're distracted. The hatch opens on the far side from the thickest concentration. You'll have a window. Maybe ten seconds."
"Ten seconds."
"I've seen people make it on less."
A long breath over the radio. The specific breath of a man squaring himself to do something insane because the only alternative was dying in a metal coffin.
"Say when."
---
We climbed. The parking structure had a skybridge connecting to the office building's third floor — I'd noted it during the recon, filed it as a potential elevated route for exactly this kind of scenario. T-Dog followed without questions, his crowbar gripped white-knuckle tight, his breathing deliberate and controlled.
From the skybridge, we could see the intersection.
The tank sat in the middle of Forsyth, a dull green island in a sea of grey-skinned bodies. The herd was massive — two, three hundred walkers packed shoulder to shoulder, milling around the tank and the remains of what had been Rick's horse. The remains were largely obscured by the cluster feeding on them, which was both a mercy and a strategic advantage. While they fed, they weren't hunting.
"Jesus," T-Dog breathed.
"See the alley? North side, between the brick building and the gray one. Red dumpster."
"I see it."
"Rick comes out the bottom hatch. He runs to that dumpster. We meet him there and cut through to the department store. Three blocks, all back alleys. I've mapped every step."
T-Dog stared at the herd. His jaw worked. "And if he doesn't make it to the dumpster?"
"He will." The certainty in my voice was absolute, and I didn't have to fake it. Rick Grimes survived this. That was canon, and canon had held so far. But a colder thought followed: canon didn't have you in it, and everything you touch changes the shape of what comes next.
I pushed that aside and keyed the radio.
"Tank man. On three. One."
T-Dog and I descended the parking structure's stairwell, fast, quiet, emerging at ground level on the north side of the intersection. The department store was three blocks east — I could see its roofline from here.
"Two."
We reached the mouth of the alley. The red dumpster sat twenty meters in. The alley was clear. Behind us, the herd's moan rose and fell like a tide.
"Three. Go."
Through the radio: the clang of a hatch opening, the heavy thud of boots hitting pavement, and then running. The signal broke into static as Rick moved, but I didn't need radio contact anymore. I needed eyes.
A figure emerged from behind the tank at a dead sprint. Tall, lean, wearing a sheriff's uniform streaked with grime and blood. A bag bounced against his hip. His boots hammered the asphalt with a desperate rhythm that was too loud and perfectly timed.
Walkers at the herd's edge turned. The ones feeding didn't — their attention was locked on the meal — but the peripheral stragglers, the ones that had been milling at the edges, oriented toward the new sound. Three of them lurched into Rick's path.
He didn't slow. He dropped his shoulder and drove through the first one like a linebacker through a tackling dummy, sending it spinning sideways. The second grabbed his sleeve and he tore free, the fabric ripping. The third was reaching when Rick hit the alley mouth and the walls closed around him, too narrow for the walkers to follow in a group.
He made it to the dumpster in four seconds. I stepped out from behind it.
"You're Glenn."
"You're alive. Let's keep it that way."
His face was everything the show had depicted and nothing like it. Up close, Rick Grimes was thinner than Andrew Lincoln had played him — gaunt from the coma, hollow around the eyes, running on adrenaline and the animal refusal to die. His hands shook. The bag from the tank hung from his shoulder, clinking softly with the sound of metal on metal.
T-Dog appeared behind me. "We good?"
"We're good. Three blocks to the department store. Stay between me and T-Dog, don't stop for anything, and if I change direction—"
The cold hit. Sharp. Left side. Close.
"—move. Now. Right alley. Go."
I shoved Rick sideways into the connecting alley a half-second before two walkers stumbled around the corner of the building ahead. T-Dog's crowbar caught the first one across the temple on the way past — a clean, practiced swing that dropped it instantly. The second lurched after us but we were already through the cross-alley and into the service corridor that ran behind a row of shops.
Rick looked at me. The look held a question he didn't have breath to ask: How did you know?
"Lucky," I said. "Keep moving."
---
[Department Store — Afternoon]
The department store's loading dock was propped open with a cinderblock — not how I'd left it during the recon. Someone else was inside.
The cold murmured: present, but not screaming. The threats were outside, behind us, not within. I pulled the dock door wider and we slipped through into a stockroom that smelled like cardboard and stale perfume.
"Hello?" A woman's voice. Sharp, edged with fear. Andrea appeared from behind a shelving unit with her pistol aimed at Rick's chest.
"Andrea, it's me." I stepped into her sightline. "We found the guy on the radio."
Her gun dropped two inches. Not holstered — Andrea didn't holster until she was certain. Behind her, Morales emerged from the retail floor, a machete in his hand. Jacqui followed, her dark face tight with controlled alarm.
"You brought a stranger into our fallback position?" Andrea's voice was ice. "With half of Atlanta following him?"
"Half of Atlanta was already following him before I got involved. This is Rick. He's one of ours." The words came out before I could analyze them, and they carried a weight I hadn't intended — one of ours, as if the quarry camp had a membership card and I was on the admissions committee.
Rick stepped forward. "Rick Grimes. King County Sheriff's Department. I was trying to find my wife and son."
Something shifted in Andrea's posture. Sheriff's deputy — authority, training, legitimacy. Her gun lowered the rest of the way. "Andrea Harrison. We've got a problem."
The problem was visible from the retail floor. I walked to the front of the store and looked through the display windows and my stomach dropped.
Walkers. Pressed against the glass. Dozens deep, faces smashed flat, hands scraping, mouths working. The glass groaned with each collective push — a sound like ice cracking on a lake, the precursor to a breach that was measured in minutes, not hours.
"They followed you," Morales said. Not accusing — just a fact, laid on the table.
"They followed the noise from the tank. Gunshots carry." I studied the glass. Counted the walkers I could see. Stopped counting at sixty because the math didn't matter — enough to kill us ten times over. "Where's Merle?"
"Roof." Andrea's mouth compressed into a line. "Shooting at them. Which is making it worse."
As if summoned, gunfire cracked from above — single shots, spaced five seconds apart. Each one drew a visible ripple through the herd outside, walkers turning toward the sound, pressing tighter against the building.
"I'll deal with it. Rick, stay here. T-Dog, watch the loading dock. Nobody goes outside until I say."
I climbed the stairs to the roof two at a time.
---
Merle Dixon stood at the roof's edge with a hunting rifle against his shoulder and a grin that belonged on something meaner than a human face.
He was bigger than I expected. Late forties, corded arms, a face that wore its years in hard lines and broken capillaries. He fired again — the crack splitting the air — and whooped as a walker below dropped.
"Like shootin' fish in a barrel!" He didn't turn around. He'd heard me coming and didn't care. "You bring me more targets, short round?"
The slur landed with the casual precision of a man who'd weaponized language so long it came out reflexive. I catalogued it and set it aside. Merle Dixon was a problem, but he was a problem with a timeline I knew — handcuffed to a pipe on this roof, left behind, hacksaw, one hand gone. That future was hours away.
"You need to stop shooting."
"The hell I do. This is the most fun I've had since the world went sideways."
"Every shot draws more of them. The glass downstairs is about to give. You're turning a bad situation into a death sentence for everyone in this building."
Merle turned then. The grin stayed, but his eyes — pale blue, bloodshot, the pupils slightly off-kilter in a way that suggested chemical assistance — held something sharper than amusement. He looked me over. The assessment was quick, predatory, and concluded with a dismissal so total it was almost impressive.
"Why don't you run along, China boy. Let the men handle it."
My danger sense pulsed. Not from the walkers below — from Merle himself. A dry heat at the back of my neck, different from the cold of walker-threat. Human danger. The prickling warmth of hostile intent that the system was just learning to distinguish.
Human-specific: Prickling heat, especially at the back of neck. Phase Two sensation, arriving ahead of schedule. Stress was accelerating the development. Good to know. Bad timing.
"The glass breaks, everyone dies. Including you." I kept my voice flat. "Put the rifle down and help us figure a way out, or stand up here shooting until the building comes down around you. Your call."
Merle's grin widened. He lowered the rifle — slowly, theatrically — and rested it against the roof's ledge.
"Boy's got bark." He spat over the edge. "Let's see if he's got bite."
I turned and went back downstairs. Behind me, the rifle stayed silent.
Small victories.
---
The group gathered on the retail floor. Rick. T-Dog. Andrea. Morales. Jacqui. Merle, who descended from the roof and claimed a lawn chair near the escalators with the posture of a man who'd decided to observe rather than participate. Six people and me, trapped in a box with the dead pressing at every window.
"Sewers," Jacqui said. She'd found maintenance plans in the store's utility room. "There's access through the basement. If the tunnels are passable—"
"They won't be." I said it before I could stop myself. In the show, the sewer route was blocked by walkers. "The drainage system funnels everything downtown. It'll be packed."
Morales frowned. "How do you know that?"
"Same way I know the streets. I've been mapping this city for a week. The underground is worse than the surface." Careful. Slow down. Let them catch up. "But the construction site two blocks east — there's a fenced yard with vehicles. Trucks, maybe a box van. If two people can get through the herd to the site, they can bring a vehicle to the loading dock and we drive out."
"Through the herd." Andrea's voice was flat. "The herd that's three hundred deep."
"Not through. As." I looked at the corpse visible through the window — a walker that had been trampled by the herd and lay crushed on the sidewalk, its torso flattened, organs exposed. "They hunt by smell. Cover yourself in enough of the dead, and the dead don't see you."
The silence that followed had a texture — thick, appalled, on the edge of a collective gag reflex.
Rick spoke first. "That's..." He stopped. Started again. "You're serious."
"I'm standing in a building that's going to be breached in less than an hour. Yeah. I'm serious."
Rick looked at the window. At the herd. At the corpse. Then back at me.
"Tell me what we need."
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