Chapter 17: Walking Home
[Commercial Strip, Atlanta — Afternoon]
The parking spot was empty.
I stood on the curb and stared at the space where the Challenger had been — between the delivery truck and the dumpster, sheltered from view, exactly where I'd left it three hours ago — and the space stared back with the particular blankness of a thing that had been stolen and didn't care about my feelings.
Glass on the asphalt. A scatter of safety-glass cubes, blue-green, from the driver's side window. Fresh tire marks — black rubber on pale concrete, the signature of an aggressive departure, someone who'd found the car, broken in, hot-wired it, and driven away without looking back.
"Son of a bitch," I said.
Rick crouched beside the tire marks. Studied them. His detective's training was visible in the way he read the scene — angle of departure, width of the tracks, the arc suggesting a U-turn before heading south.
Daryl actually laughed. Not a happy sound — a short, barking exhalation that carried equal parts bitter recognition and grudging admiration. "That's Merle. That's my damn brother."
"You can't know that."
"One-handed, cauterized, pissed off, and looking for a way out of the city. What's the first thing he'd do? Find wheels. And where's the only car within a mile that ain't got flat tires and a dead battery?" He kicked a shard of safety glass. "That's Merle."
He was right. The probability was overwhelming, and my meta-knowledge confirmed it — in the show, Merle had escaped Atlanta in the cube van, but the details varied. The Challenger being here, accessible, identifiable as belonging to the people who'd left him on the roof — that was too perfect a target for a man whose survival instinct was rivaled only by his capacity for revenge.
"So we walk," T-Dog said from the radio when Rick relayed the situation. His voice crackled with static and something that might have been a suppressed laugh. "You want me to bring the cube van down?"
"Stay put. We'll make it by nightfall if we move now." Rick clipped the radio to his belt and looked at the three of us — me, Daryl, himself — with the expression of a man doing math he didn't like. "We've got the cache supplies, the extra ammo from Guillermo, and whatever water's left. Twelve miles to the quarry, three hours of daylight. We stay off the main roads and we don't stop."
Daryl was already moving. He'd shifted into tracking mode — a forward-leaning posture with the crossbow at low-ready that ate ground with a relentless, tireless stride. Whatever grief or anger he carried about Merle had been converted into locomotion, the physical equivalent of channeling a river through a turbine.
I shouldered the gym bag — heavier now with the cache supplies, the weight pressing against my spine — and fell into step behind him. Rick took the rear. Three men, armed, walking through the outskirts of a dead city toward a quarry twelve miles north.
The quiet-walking technique I'd taught Sophia on a morning that belonged to a different century seemed absurd in the context of a twelve-mile forced march, but the principles held: test the ground, commit your weight, control your breath. My feet found their rhythm. The bat swung at my side. The danger sense hummed at its post-herd baseline — ambient, diffuse, manageable.
---
[Highway North, Mile 4 — Late Afternoon]
Four miles of silence before Daryl spoke.
"You knew about that nursing home."
The statement landed in the space between footsteps, casual as a dropped coin, and carried twice the weight.
"I knew there was a fortified building on Elm. I'd seen it during the recon but didn't investigate."
"You told the old lady you liked her dogs."
"I told her the dogs were very impressive."
"You were in there fifteen minutes before we busted in. Fifteen minutes with men who grabbed you off the street and zip-tied your wrists, and you came out telling us they were good people." Daryl's stride didn't change. His eyes stayed forward, scanning the road. But his voice had shifted into a register I hadn't heard from him before — not hostile, not warm. Evaluative. "Most folks would've been scared. Or mad. You figured them out."
"They weren't hard to figure out."
"Nah. They were plenty hard to figure out. You're just..." He trailed off. Chewed on the word he wanted. "Good weird."
The phrase landed like a handshake — tentative, unexpected, and carrying more significance than its surface simplicity suggested. Good weird. In the character bible I carried in my photographic memory, that phrase was Daryl Dixon's highest form of compliment. It meant I don't understand you, but I respect you, and I'm watching to see what you do next.
"Thanks. I think."
Daryl grunted. The conversation was over. But something had shifted in the space between us — a millimeter of trust, barely visible, the kind of structural change that would only become apparent later when weight was placed on it and it held.
---
[Highway North, Mile 9 — Dusk]
The last water bottle held maybe four ounces. We'd been rationing since mile six, passing it around in the unspoken choreography of men sharing scarcity. Daryl drank sparingly — a sip that barely wet his lips. Rick took less. I took less than Rick.
T-Dog had drunk the last full mouthful at mile seven, and the guilt on his face when he handed back the empty bottle was entirely out of proportion to the offense. "I didn't mean to—"
"Tomorrow's problem," I said. The words came out rough. My throat was sandpaper and my legs had developed a specific ache at the junction of thigh and hip that suggested twelve miles on asphalt was not, in fact, the same as twelve miles of pizza delivery on residential streets. "We'll be home in an hour."
My danger sense pressed.
Not spiked. Pressed. The cold deepened — not from one direction but from ahead, spread across the road in a broad band that meant multiple threats, moving perpendicular to your path. The sensation was new in its specificity: not the omni-directional overload of the department store herd, but a clear geographical warning that said the road ahead is occupied.
I threw my arm out. Caught Rick's shoulder. He stopped.
"What—"
"Off the road. Now. Against the wall."
We flattened into a doorway. An industrial building, some kind of sheet-metal fabricator, with a recessed entrance that put us three feet back from the sidewalk. Daryl's crossbow came up. Rick's hand went to the Beretta. I pressed my back against the door and breathed through my teeth.
They came around the corner thirty seconds later. Walkers — not a herd, but a pack, twenty or thirty of them moving in a loose column down the cross street. They shuffled past our intersection with the mechanical purposelessness of things drawn by a stimulus that had already passed, following a sound or a scent that had led them this direction and would lead them onward until something new drew them elsewhere.
We stood in the doorway. Four feet from the nearest walker. Close enough to see individual features — a woman in jogging gear, one shoe missing; a man in a business suit with his tie still knotted; a teenager in a football jersey, the number 22 on the back stained dark with something that wasn't mud.
Daryl's finger rested on the crossbow trigger. I put my hand on the stock. Slow. Gentle. The meaning was clear: don't.
The teenager passed within arm's reach. Its clouded eyes swept across our position without registering us — the recess was dark, we were still, and the ambient stench of the fabrication building masked our scent.
Thirty-two walkers. I counted each one as it passed, the number locking into memory with the involuntary precision that my photographic recall imposed on everything it touched. Thirty-two walkers that would have walked directly into us on the highway if we'd kept moving for another forty-five seconds.
The pack cleared. The moaning faded. The cold retreated in stages, pulling back from my awareness like a tide.
"How did you know?" Rick's voice. Quiet.
"Bad feeling." The lie of the century, delivered with the flat conviction of a man who'd been telling it for ten days and would tell it for years.
Rick looked at me. The look lasted two full seconds — longer than casual, shorter than interrogation — and carried the weight of every other moment when Glenn Rhee had known something he shouldn't, moved before he should have seen, stopped before he should have heard. The ledger in Rick's mind was getting longer, and the column that said explained by pizza delivery was running out of room.
He said nothing. He turned north and kept walking.
The quarry appeared twenty minutes later. Firelight through the trees — warm, orange, the flickering signature of a camp that was still alive, still burning, still holding the line against the dark.
My legs burned. My shoulders ached from the bag's weight. My wrists throbbed where the zip ties had bitten, and the water deficit made every joint feel like it was packed with sand instead of fluid. But the light was there, and the light meant home, and home meant rest and food and—
The danger sense detonated.
Not pressed. Not spiked. Detonated — a full-body seizure of cold that started at the crown of my skull and cascaded downward through every nerve ending, every muscle fiber, every synapse. The hair on my arms rose so fast it hurt. My vision tunneled. My hands locked on the bat with a grip that went past voluntary and into the primal circuitry that governed fight-or-flight in the species that had survived when everything else had died.
From the direction of the camp: a scream.
Then gunfire.
I ran.
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