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Carl woke up in the arms of strangers, hidden in shadows. He jerked away from the warmth of the bodies huddled around him and swung a fist – only to hear a woman’s voice and falter. His palms scratched against the floor as he shuffled back, putting as much distance between himself and them as he could, until something cold and hard pressed against his back and he found himself cornered. Cornered and hurting and blinking in the dark, disoriented, confused.
“We’re not with them, honey!” the woman’s voice from before assured him; Carl couldn’t tell where it was coming from. “We’re not with them. We’re prisoners here just like you are. You don’t have to be scared of us, okay?”
Who was ‘them’? They were prisoners? What were they-
Oh. Oh. It was all coming back to him now.
Carl let out a breath. He patted himself down, checking that all his clothes were in place. He was missing his jacket, his hat, his belt. He still had the bandage over his eye, good. He realised with a baited groan that shit hurt, bruised to the bone and muscles stretched thin and cold all over, skin prickling. “Fuck,” he breathed; meaning it to be quiet, but the train-cart made everything echo.
“Yeah, you can say that again,” a loud voice boomed somewhere to his right, causing Carl to jump. He blinked rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust to the dark. No luck. He strained his ears instead. The train cart they’d been shoved in was metallic, every footstep and nudge creating a booming echo. It was impossible to tell how many people had been shoved in with him. All he knew was that the woman who’d spoken first had inched closer, trying to find Carl’s face in the dark; after a second or two, he could make out her pale, dirty skin and ratty brown hair.
“How long you been here?” she asked.
Carl shrugged and hoped he could see it. Through the gaps in the cart’s walls, he could see that it was light out. He remembered that it was dark when those Terminus fucks had first ‘saved’ him, nearing sunrise when they revealed the choice he had to make if he wanted to stay with them. His choice hadn’t pleased them, so they’d knocked him out. Carl didn’t think they would’ve left him to sleep all day, which made him decide that today was still today.
It made him feel nauseous to think that a whole group of survivors had been shoved in the train-cart with him and he hadn’t stirred. Anything could have happened. Anything-
“What was that?” another woman’s voice called over the rest. In the din of their echoing cage, Carl had no idea what she was talking about. Until the rest of them stopped shuffling and silence fell for long enough for them to hear gunshots start. Lots and lots of gunshots.
“That’s gotta be us, right?” asked a different woman. That made at least four strangers, probably more.
Carl, feeling vulnerable still spread out on the floor, groped at the inside wall of the train-cart to pull himself to his feet. He pressed himself into the corner, twitching, waiting for the moment that he had to start throwing fists. His mind was working against itself. One side of it: okay, we can probably get out of this, a big group of us together, right? On the other side: shit, no, no, I need to get out, I need to get away.
Groups were bad, in Carl’s experience.
Terminus was probably worse, he told himself. The woman who’d woken him up had seemed nice enough. She might’ve even tried to keep talking to him if the gunshots hadn’t started.
Gunshots that hadn’t ended, that were ongoing alongside shouting and dull booms. Something bad was happening. Or, for them, something good. They just needed to get out of this train-cart…which was soon, Carl could hear, surrounding by snarling, groaning walkers who could smell their trapped forms within. Knowing that there was no use in checking for himself whether there was a different way of escaping the cart, however, Carl kept to his corner. He tried to focus on his breathing, tried to follow where people were moving around him. None of them had weapons, yet they still shuffled around in agitation. Gearing up for a fight. They had to fight their way out.
That’s all anything in the world was, these days. A constant, draining fight.
Minutes passed. Five, ten, twenty, maybe sixty. The group he was locked in here with were talking, some conversation that he didn’t bother paying attention to. Not until the train-cart door was suddenly wrenched open.
Light flooded their darkened space, blinding Carl (oh, he had a migraine, fun). His ears rang sharply as the battleground outside reached them at its full volume, as the other trapped survivors stormed out of the cart with thudding footsteps. Carl barely processed what was happening before he threw himself after them, stumbling, barely keeping up. One of the strangers grabbed him by the back of the shirt to haul him ahead – a dark-skinned woman who looked like she meant business, who gave Carl a stern nod when he threw a look at her. She let go of his shirt. She was pointing and her mouth was moving and Carl just had to assume that they were running for freedom, whatever that meant.
Though he didn’t feel like it sometimes, Carl was still small. He was still a kid. He found himself stretching his legs as far as they would go just to keep close to the group. Groups were usually bad for Carl, but being able to hide between the taller bodies and fight in numbers against walker herds were one strength. Since they also had the Terminus soldiers to worry about as well as a herd, a whole herd, their numbers were even more convenient. At least some part of their group had found guns of their own, covering them while they ran; the rest held different forms of shivs and bats, bludgeoning anything that came near.
Carl, trying to make sure that they didn’t mistake him for one of their enemies, did his best to help. He shoved at walkers, grabbed at them, making sure they were either falling into the paths of bullets and shivs or not advancing up behind anybody unsuspecting. It got him a few nods of thanks.
Between the taller bodies running with him, Carl eventually spotted what they were going for. A chain-link fence. The big man running at the front had already found a bloodied, stained tarp to throw over the top of it so they wouldn’t rip their flesh. One-by-one, they were vaulting over, and Carl shoved his way forwards because he knew he couldn’t be guaranteed that they wouldn’t leave him for dead to keep their pursuers occupied.
Luckily, these folk didn’t seem as shitty as most people Carl met. The dark-skinned lady even dropped to one knee, letting him use her leg to boost himself over the top of the fence, following quickly after him.
She almost stepped on Carl when she jumped down on the other side. He’d lost his footing, still weakened and exhausted and reeling from the beating he’d been getting just a few hours ago. Sensing her attempts to reach for him and help him up, Carl crawled away towards a tree, clawing at it to get back to his feet.
The woman stared at him for a moment before whirling around, watching and helping her friends get over the fence. The gunfire didn’t seem to be following them anymore; either the walkers had gotten to the Terminus folk, or these survivors had managed to drive them back. Whatever the case, Carl saw his opportunity.
He turned tail and ran.
“Hey! Wait!”
They were chasing him.
And Carl was stupid enough to think that he’d probably manage to get away when arms wrapped around him, big arms, pulling him back against a solid body and squeezing. He writhed, crying out, jabbing with his elbows and kicking all he could, a slew of curse words lined up on the tip of his tongue to throw at the bastards. Curse words that died when other voices yelled out, calls of, “Abraham, let him go! You’re freaking him out-!”
The arms loosened and Carl fell away, straight into the reach of that dark-skinned woman. She spread her hands as if she were approaching a skittish animal; she looked Carl in the eye, holding it as she moved towards him. Maybe it was the fact that she was a woman, but he didn’t throw her off when she placed a hand on his arm and held on. She gave him a tug and the group kept moving.
I’ll stay with them until we’re away from Terminus, Carl told himself, still stumbling even as they were moving a little slower, chest heaving with great pants of breath. He could taste copper. He was trembling, maybe, but he was too busy trying to keep jogging that he couldn’t tell. He was jogging while the rest of the group was walking quickly. God, he hoped he’d get a growth-spurt soon.
Then they stopped. A man at the front of the group was suddenly digging something out of the earth. Carl took the opportunity to peel away from the woman and use another tree for a prop. Now, he thought, now seemed like the right time to go. Most of them were distracted, demanding why they were stopping and digging. Guns, one guy was saying.
…His voice sparked something in Carl that made him free in place.
Then he heard a name.
“Rick, we got out. It’s over,”
Just a coincidence, Carl told himself. Just a coincidence. He’s dead. He’s dead. It’s not possible.
That familiar voice started speaking again, “It’s not over ‘til they’re all dead,”
Bickering began. Carl wasn’t breathing. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but there was no mistaking the face of the man who was arguing that they should go back and kill the rest of the Terminus bastards. It was bloodied, sweaty, his hair was overgrown and Carl had never seen him with a beard before…it looked weird, on the face of a dead man.
“Hey,” a woman said. Not the dark-skinned one, the one with the paler skin and southern drawl who’d been there when Carl first woke up. “You alright there? Never got to ask before,”
Carl had no response.
“How long were you in there, before us?” she pressed. Still, Carl said nothing, and she looked back at her friends over her shoulder. “We gotta get out of the way, this kid isn’t looking too hot,”
“Kid?” one guy repeated, popping up in Carl’s periphery. Guy looked like some sort of hunter, crossbow and all. “I thought I’d imagined that,”
Oh, shit. Shit. Everyone was looking at him. Mostly everyone. The one person that Carl was looking at, he was too distracted organising a bag of guns and checking his ammo. He threw one look in Carl’s direction but it was fleeting and quick, and Carl…Carl realised that he probably wasn’t recognisable anymore. It had only been eighteen months since the world had ended (nineteen months since dad got shot, and died, he should’ve died in that hospital…), but Carl knew that he looked different. He was growing taller, his hair was longer, his whole eye and part of his face was covered; he was bruised and bloodied and he felt thin and starved. He probably wouldn’t recognise himself if he ever found an unshattered mirror to look at his reflection.
It was no wonder that Dad didn’t realise it was him.
He should be dead, though, Carl tried to reason. He should be dead! The hospital, they didn’t evacuate, and he was still in a coma, and he wouldn’t have survived once it got overrun, and…but he did. He’s there. That’s him.
Scared, Carl checked the faces of the rest of the survivors. Mom, Shane, were they alive, too? No, they weren’t with this crowd. Maybe they’d been separated. Carl didn’t know if it would be better or worse if they were alive, too. They hadn’t – they hadn’t come for him at school, when it had started getting bad. They would’ve have left him there if they’d been alive. That was what he’d been telling himself. He’d waited at the school for a week, until looters started coming by to scavenge the last of the cafeteria food. They wouldn’t – god, no, he couldn’t think.
He started to panic, trying to figure out what he could do now, whether he should say something, whether he should still run and try to make it on his own. He was telling himself that that guy wasn’t his Dad, he was just a doppleganger who happened to have the same name as him, the same voice. How much time did Carl have before the man actually looked at him and realised who he was? What did he do when that happened?
A distraction came, thank fuck. The hunter spotted someone in the trees and surged towards them; a woman with cropped grey hair, guns and a pack dangling from her arms and shoulders. When Dad spotted her, he moved in for a hug, too. The rest of the group seemed pleased to see her.
“Did you do that?” Dad asked her.
He was talking about Terminus. Somehow this woman had caused the chaos that let them get out. In another life, Carl would’ve been nudged forwards by Mom to thank her, too, because good manners had been everything. Now, he clung to his tree, momentarily forgotten again by the group. Manners weren’t worth shit anymore.
Now, he told himself. There’s not gonna be a better time to run.
Did he still need to run? What if this was, somehow, really his dad?
What if it wasn’t? What if he didn’t recognise him at all and told the others to tie him up and leave him to rot?
“Sit down,” the dark-skinned woman tried to tell him, seeing that he was wavering, his knees practically knocking together. He ignored her. The grey-haired woman had something in her hand.
“Found this,” she said, passing it to…to Rick. “I noticed it looked like yours, the one you lost?”
At first, Rick snorted, taking the deputy’s hat with a look of mild amusement. Carl spotted the exact moment it morphed into horror instead. Carl knew why. That hat, he’d scavenged it from home in the days after he’d left the school. He’d scavenged a lot of stuff of his parents’ from the house, but the only thing he’d managed to keep hold of was the hat. Rick held the hat closer, gripping it with white knuckles as he examined the inside label – what had once read R GRIMES, Carl had added on a clumsy C in a moment of missing him so bad it hurt.
“This isn’t mine,” Carl heard him whisper. “No, this isn’t…where’d you get this again?”
“With the rest of the stuff. Scavenged from the people they trapped, I guess,” the grey-haired woman shrugged. “With the label, I just, I thought it was the one you’d lost-,”
“No, no. That one was a spare, from the station, t-this one…”
He trailed off. He was thinking, hard, and Carl wasn’t sure what that meant for him. What he did know was that he was tense, he looked…he looked pained about something.
And then it occurred to him. If Carl thought that Dad was dead, Dad probably thought that Carl was dead, too.
Fucking hell. Carl hadn’t been planning for this today.
“I-I, I need to-,” Dad turned, shaking his head, raking a hand through his messy hair to shove it out of his face. Mid-turn, his gaze went past Carl. Distracted, he almost didn’t look at him again.
Almost.
Instead Dad did a double-take, jerking his head back towards Carl. Their eyes locked and Carl was torn. He wanted to run so bad – away from Dad, towards Dad. He dug his fingers into the tree until his nails splintered and bled.
Dad twitched towards him and despite the distance between them, about fifteen, twenty feet, Carl heard him whisper in hopeful, horrified disbelief, “Carl?”
No, Carl mouthed. He hadn’t – he hadn’t told anybody his name in a while, not his real one. He’d hated the way some people would say it, all slimy and taunting, nothing like the way it used to be spoken. It felt so alien to hear it again, the floor seeming to tilt beneath his feet. The dark-skinned woman grabbed him by the arm again, keeping him upright under the wave of vertigo that hit him. This time, however, he flinched away from her, wrenching his arm from her grip and drawing himself in. When Dad took that first step towards him, his whole body twitched and he thought he might throw up on the spot. Was that the pain talking, or the panic?
“Carl,” Carl heard one of the others whisper. “That’s his kid name, right? I thought his kid was dead-,”
“Um, yeah, so did he,”
“Fuck. How’d that happen?”
“Carl,” Dad practically sobbed the name. Carl’s heart was about to beat out of his fucking chest because, because he did recognise him, he was there. Dad was there. He was alive. He recognised him. Dad was there-
Dad reached towards him and Carl ended up falling back on to his ass in his haste to get away. Get away from what, he asked himself? Dad wouldn’t hurt him. Dad had promised, years and years ago, he’d never let anything happen to him.
Since then, Carl had been beaten and starved; he’d been attacked by walking corpses; he’d been kidnapped by humans who were just as bad as the corpses; he’d been shot in the face and had lost his eye and he’d been pinned down and touched and hurt. He was about to be eaten by cannibals but Dad had gotten him out of that, at least, even if it was unknowingly. And now what, Carl was meant to just step into a hug and feel safe again?
“Carl, it’s me, it’s me, son, you recognise me?” Dad had dropped to his knees a few feet away from Carl, giving him space yet reaching out towards him. “I – god, I couldn’t tell it was you, I thought you were…h-how did you survive?”
Good question. Carl said nothing.
“Do you recognise me?” Dad asked again.
Oh, right, that had been an actual question. Slowly, cautiously, Carl nodded. And Dad sobbed again.
“Fucking hell,” someone in the group swore.
“Can I – can I – come here, sweetheart, c’mon. I-I’m here now, c’mon-,”
With each panted word, Dad shuffled nearer until he was at Carl’s side. He wrapped his arms around him and pulled him close. He was hugging him. Hugs, after everything that had happened, felt weird.
It also felt like the best thing ever and Carl realised that he was crying. He didn’t really sob anymore, because that was too noisy, but his eyes were streaming and his nose was blocked and his whole face and chest burned and it was hard to breathe. He knew that he was trembling from the way his chin knocked against Dad’s shoulder. Dad, for a moment, tried to cup the back of his head to press down into his shoulder before Carl flinched again, a full-body twitch, and his grip immediately loosened. Carl sucked in a raspy, shaky breath that did nothing to make him feel better.
Dad whispered near his ear, “God, what happened to you?” and Carl flinched again. That sort of breathing next to his ear, that was the shit of nightmares.
But, he reminded himself, this was Dad. This was just Dad. This was only Dad. This wasn’t some stranger, someone who might hurt him. This was Dad. Dad was good, Dad was…safe?
As safe as could be, in this world.
Carl didn’t return the hug. That was the best he could do, not returning the hug while also not pulling away from it. He let Dad squeeze him, let him mutter into his hair and sob pathetically. Carl was glad that his group wasn’t made of asshats, otherwise something bad would’ve happened to them by now, looking so weak and stupid. If Dad cared at all that his group was watching them or that Carl was like a statue in his arms, he didn’t show it; if he also thought that Carl didn’t fit against him anymore, trembling too hard, he said nothing and made it work.
“I have you, son, I have you. We’ll be okay, you hear me? We’ve got you…shh, shh, c’mon, shh…” he was saying.
Carl didn’t know why he was being shushed. Carl was being pretty damn quiet, and he was sickly proud of himself for that. He was glad that Dad was doing the talking, too, because Carl didn’t have any words that fit what was happening.
“Rick,” a voice spoke up awkwardly. “Sorry, um – we should move. We’ve gotta get out of here,”
“Right. Y-Yeah,” Dad rasped, pulling back. He cupped Carl’s face in sweaty, dirty hands. He thumbed away the tears under his one eye and frowned openly at the eye he didn’t have – not that Dad could tell that, with the gauze in the way. Carl could see that wanted to ask about it but now, of course, wasn’t the time.
…Carl didn’t think that it had actually sunk in yet. He felt like he was in a dream, like his body wasn’t his own. He kept telling himself, Dad’s here. Dad’s alive. Dad’s holding your hands and he’s helping you stand up. It’s real.
Dad let out a wet, broken chuckle as he said, “You’ve gotten taller,”
Had he? Carl still felt small, but, he supposed it had been nearly two years since Dad had seen him. Or had it been longer? Time was hard to keep track of these days. He seemed to be right, though. Carl remembered how he used to have to crane his neck all the way back to look up at Dad’s face, while now the top of his head lined up with his shoulder.
Dad’s alive. Dad’s alive. You’re standing next to him and he’s alive, and you’re taller now. It’s so real!
Carl couldn’t feel his expression change.
“This is my son,” Dad announced to his friends, getting the inevitable out of the way because the rest of today would get pretty awkward otherwise. “Carl Grimes. I thought he was dead, but, well…I guess miracles do happen, huh?”
Carl might’ve snorted. ‘Miracles’. If you could call being left to fend for yourself at the end of the world a ‘miracle’…though, there was something very impossible about the way Dad had survived the first few weeks of the virus when he’d been in a coma. How had he gotten out? Where had he gone? Had it been weird for him, to wake up in a world that wasn’t meant for humanity anymore?
It must’ve hurt, Carl thought, to fall asleep with a son and wake up without one. That was kind of like what it had felt like for Carl, too, when he’d finally collapsed from exhaustion while he hid in the school alone.
Anyways.
Oh, they were on the move.
Dad walked with a purpose. He wasn’t leading the group, as Carl suspected he usually did, but he wasn’t letting him lag behind either. They walked smack-bang within the middle of the group, covered on all sides. It made Carl’s skin prickle with anxiety. It made him grimace when Dad wrapped an arm around his back, holding him tight, unabashedly staring at him while they walked. Carl kept his gaze ahead. He didn’t know what to say.
“How you holdin’ up?” Dad asked, his voice vaguely pained. Whatever he saw in Carl’s face, it must’ve been telling him a pretty sad story. “Let me know if you need to stop for a break, okay? We can take our time,”
Carl just kept his gaze ahead, too anxious to give a response, not even a nod or a shake of his head. He surprised himself, though, when Dad suddenly decided to walk a little slower. He was trying to slow their pace down for Carl’s sake – he was limping from a pain in his hip that was pretty old and familiar, by this point – but all it did was place in right in Carl’s blind-spot. He’d been bobbing in and out of Carl’s limited periphery this whole time, but that just made it worse, and…and Carl almost panicked. It was an insane, childish reaction. It made him halt suddenly, shrugging away Dad’s arm and quickly side-stepping to the man’s other side. It was a comfort to be able to see him.
“Shit. Sorry,” Dad mumbled. He understood, then. His arm went back around Carl’s back.
They kept moving.
And moving.
And moving.
Dad tried to talk. He tried to ask questions, to pry words from Carl’s mouth, but nothing came out. They stopped for a break after a while, catching their breaths, and Dad pulled out a rag to clean Carl’s face – they had no water, so a lick of spit against his thumb had to do. That was how Carl learned that he’d had a bloodied nose, earlier, and a large graze covering half of his forehead. Dad was looking at him so sadly, but he’d figured out by this point that he wasn’t going to get his questions answered, not yet.
Before they moved on again, Dad smoothed back Carl’s hair and planted a kiss above the stinging graze on his forehead. It lingered and Carl worried that Dad would start crying again. He didn’t. He wiped Carl’s cheek again, instead. Embarrassingly Carl hadn’t even felt his tears. Dad said something to him, but the words fell on deaf ears; he didn’t think he was ready to hear them, not yet, not until his brain believed that this is real.
Later on, when they found themselves an abandoned cabin that the grey-haired woman said was clear, Carl was told that he was in shock. The grey-haired woman said so, anyways, when she passed Dad the one bottle of water she carried.
“He’ll come around,” she promised, patting Dad on the shoulder. Dad, who was sat close to Carl against the outside wall of the hut. Almost everybody else had filed inside, probably to give them some sense of privacy. A few of them had volunteered to keep a perimeter, but even they kept their distance.
“I know,” Dad replied, his voice all soft and nice like it used to be, when the world was good.
The grey-haired woman left them to it. Dad uncapped the water bottle and told Carl to take a few sips – they had to share, which meant they had to conserve. Carl took the smallest sip he could that made him feel a bit more alive. In the back of his mind, he wondered what Dad and his group did to members who overstepped and got greedy in their shares of things. Carl had only made that sort of mistake once and got strung up in a tree by his ankle for it. Lucky that was what had happened to him; other groups he’d been with had been far more punishing.
With that thought in mind, clawing its way to the forefront, aching as ever to remind Carl of his pain, he finally felt some control over himself. He chose to drop his head against his Dad’s shoulder. He felt Dad’s sigh of relief.
“I know it’s hard,” he whispered. “I can’t imagine…but it’s okay now, hm? It’s gonna be okay,”
Carl tried to soak in his words, tried so hard to believe in them, but there was something blocking his mind. Too much…stuff in the way. Too much shittiness, too many questions. Like, how did you survive? And, did Mom survive, too? And, how’d you get to Terminus? And, what do we do now?
Carl opened his mouth, but, not a sound came out.
“You’ve not said nothing yet,” Dad observed, managing to watch him even with Carl using his shoulder as a pillow. “Is that…by choice or has something happened-?”
Carl shook his head before he could finish the sentence. Then he shrugged. He didn’t even know what the answer was, himself, he just…he was sick of talking. All talking did was get him into more trouble. All it did was give people new ways to hurt him, to humiliate him, to torture him. It’s not like that with Dad, he reminded himself, but his brain wasn’t listening, and they all knew how consuming a brain could become, even without its host’s control.
“Then here,” Dad said, moving his hand to take Carl’s. He guided them into the space between them and turned his own hand over, palm facing upwards. “You can trace what you want to say, or, or tap – once for ‘yes’, twice for ‘no’, three for ‘I don’t know’, how’s that?”
Carl tapped the palm of his Dad’s hand once. That earned him a tiny smile.
“Alright, well…” Dad trailed off for a moment; apparently he had just as many questions as Carl. He chose to ask first, “Have you been alone this whole time, son? No one…no group, no one to take care of you?”
That was an easy yes. Carl had had a few groups, sure, but none of them had really ‘taken care’ of him. He’d had to pull his own weight – which would have been fair! Except he’d never seemed to manage to do enough, never managed to make himself not a nuisance. He’d only ever caused annoyance and anger and more often than not turned into the group’s go-to punching bag, or go-to walker bait whenever they needed a distraction. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Did it mean that every group he’d found had just been horrible, or was he just a bad, annoying kid to be around?
Probably a mixture of both.
Dad swallowed. “Okay. Uh, did you at least find a group to get you out of Atlanta?”
No, Carl tapped, frowning. Atlanta? Who’d said anything about Atlanta?
“You got out of there by yourself, then?”
No, he tapped again. Why did Dad think he’d been in Atlanta?
Dad, it appeared, was wondering the same thing. “Your school was evacuated to the city, right?” he asked. Carl tapped, no. “What? But I – Shane, your mom, they said there must’ve been refugee buses taking families to the city,”
No, that wasn’t what had happened at all. Evacuations had been happening all over town once panic had startled building about the infection, once it had gotten into their town itself. But Carl’s elementary school had never been evacuated. Parents had flocked to it, picking up their kids and taking them away; by the time evacuation should’ve been considered, the school was empty of every student except for Carl. One teacher had stayed with him until their daughter had called screaming about something and they’d upped and left. So Carl had waited, and waited, and waited. Mom should’ve been there to pick him up, too. When she didn’t know, he assumed she’d died, too, just like everybody else.
So Dad thought you were never even at school, he told himself, mechanically running through the facts. He thought you were all the way in Atlanta. And Atlanta was a bloodbath.
He said, ‘they said’, Shane and Mom. They were alive. They found Dad. How the…?
“Where were you, then?” Dad whispered hoarsely. “Where did you go? Did you…stay at the school?”
Yes, tapped Carl.
“How long for?”
Carl traced the number 7.
“Days?”
Yes.
“Where did you go after?”
Slowly, Carl traced the word HOME. Followed quickly by RAN.
“You went home, but you had to run. Nobody was there,” Dad suddenly scoffed, shaking his head as he dropped it back against the wall. He chewed on his tongue, staring blankly into space. Despite that blankness, though, Carl could see the simmering underlayers of rage boiling under his father’s skin. There was something real dangerous about his eyes, the kind of look in them something he’d seen before, something he’d cowered away from.
He would’ve cowered away now, probably, but they were kind of holding hands and Carl had the sudden, irrational fear that moving away would cause them both to spontaneously combust. That was a weird state to be in, after months or years of fearing touch from anybody.
“Right,” murmured Dad, nodding jerkily, thinking something through. “Right, okay. Okay. But you came back to us, you…” he trailed off when he glanced over at Carl’s face. At his covered ‘eye’. “When did that happen?”
How many times had he asked that now?
Carl shrugged again.
“You’ve gotta tell me, son,” Dad practically pleaded, squeezing his hand. “I need to know if, if you need medical attention, anything like that? I’m sure Carol got her hands on some sorta first aid, we can figure something out. I don’t want you hurting, not if we can help it,”
Well…when he thought about it, Carl knew that his eye socket was gonna need a clean soon, and a bandage change. It wouldn’t do him much good to end up with an infection in his face and skull. Though the wound was nearing five months old and seemed fully healed, it still sometimes wept clear fluid and got stinky. But, accepting Dad’s offer meant taking the bandage off, showing him what was beneath. And Carl wasn’t ready for that yet.
“Is there anything I can do, any way to make you feel better?” Dad asked after a few seconds of silence, squeezing his hand gently. Carl glanced down, noticing with sick curiosity how red, bloodied and bruised Dad’s knuckles were. How many faces had he pounded to a pulp with his fists? Dad used to be such a good guy, but, Carl knew from experience that good people didn’t survive in this world. That they had to do terrible things to keep themselves, and others, alive.
“Are you scared?” Dad pressed.
Yes, tapped Carl. May as well be honest. It wasn’t as if he could lie and be like, no, I’m good. He was terrified. This was terrifying. Dad was somehow alive again and somehow they’d found each other and Carl didn’t know when either of those things would end. All good things did, right?
Slowly, before Dad could ask more questions, Carl traced the letters: HOW YOU ALIVE. It occurred to him as he did that this was the first time he’d ever needed to ‘write’ anything, so to say, since things had gone bad. Nearly two years without reading, writing, doing math. He was still a little dumb ten-year-old in some ways, older in others.
“I woke up in the hospital, alone,” explained Dad, voice low, squeezing Carl’s hand repetitively. “I found my way outside, trying to find someone for help or, or to explain things? There were bodies everywhere. A man, Morgan, and his little boy, they found me at our place, after I…after I realised that you and your Mom weren’t there. He explained things, said that most folk went to the refugee centres in Atlanta. So that’s where I went,”
Carl barely heard most of what he said. He found himself focused on the first sentence. I woke up in the hospital. So, he had been there. Somehow the walkers hadn’t gotten to him. Carl had…he’d gone to the hospital, maybe two weeks after he had to run from his home, and hadn’t been able to get very close because it’d looked overrun. If he’d been braver, more patient, could he have found Dad years ago? If Dad had gotten out without issue, Carl definitely could’ve gotten in. He couldn’t been there for when he woke up, he could’ve held his hand as he helped him outside, then together they could’ve beaten this world before it could beat either of them.
Dad wiped his cheek dry again. Fuck’s sake. SORRY, he traced.
“Nothin’ to be sorry for, sweetheart. Nothin’,” Dad told him, quiet but fierce. He had no idea. When Carl looked closely with his good eye, he could see how battered his Dad had been. There were pale scars on his face beneath the blood and grime, scars that hadn’t been there before. He was wrinkled, his hair was grey. Carl remembered his voice earlier, how he’d wanted to go back into Terminus and wipe out the rest of the stragglers.
The worst part was, Carl didn’t blame him. What did that say about either of them?
That was it, then, for the rest of the day. Carl closed an eye and Dad must’ve thought he’d fallen asleep because he stayed still and quiet and even cried a little, though he tried to supress it. He kept turning his head to kiss Carl’s hair and whisper those words again, the ones that Carl was scared to hear so he pretended he didn’t. Eventually, he gave Carl a nudge, and Carl figured he may as well act like he’d been asleep. He blinked his one eye open groggily and peered at Dad questioningly.
“We should go inside,” Dad whispered. “I’ll introduce you to the group and weP’ll see what we’ve got for food, huh?”
It turned out, they had nothing for food. The grey-haired woman, Carol, was the best-kitted of all of them, and even she had nothing left. One of the group, the guy with the crossbow – Daryl, Carl was told – had gone out to try and hunt something for them all. He came back at dark, however, empty-handed. Dad was super apologetic. Carl could only shrug so many times before he lost his patience and grabbed his hand and traced the words, NOT HUNGRY.
The group were introduced to him, then, one-by-one. The dark-skinned woman who’d sort-of helped him earlier was named Michonne, and she sat on Dad’s other side; they seemed like good friends just from the look they shared. The pale-skinned woman who’d woken him up in the train-cart was Maggie, and she was married to the friendly Asian man, Glenn. There were a brother and sister pair, Tyreese and Sasha, who seemed to keep to themselves until a dude named Bob came and sat down and kept making Sasha giggle. The loud ginger man was Abraham; mullet dude was Eugene; Rosita and Tara were way too pretty to be hanging out with either of them.
It was the first time that Carl had taken a proper look at everyone. It was the first time that he considered, huh, none of them seem like assholes. The slimiest person in the group was Eugene, but he looked like he wouldn’t (or, more accurately, couldn’t) hurt a fly. Abraham was maybe the most intimidating of everyone due to his size, but he barely spared Carl a glance, too busy prattling on about Washington DC, for some reason. Was that the group’s goal, to get to D.C.? From Carl’s limited times of venturing near to the city of Atlanta, he thought that was a stupid idea, and started to plan how he'd bail from this group to avoid it.
Only to realise that he couldn’t. Dad was here. He had to stick with Dad now…right?
Yes, obviously, Carl told himself fiercely. Where would he go now? How long would he last alone? He didn’t want to be alone, not anymore. Bad things had happened when he’d been ‘alone’; no group he’d come across had seemed as content as this one. While nobody seemed stupidly kind, because that sort of thing got you killed nowadays, there was a feeling of…sanity. Humanity? They’d seen an unconscious kid locked in a train-cart with them and had seemed pretty willing to adopt him into their group even before he’d been revealed as their leader’s long-dead son. That meant something. It had to. Because Carl knew he wouldn’t have the strength to split from Dad if they revealed truer colours.
“So, uh, Carl?” Glenn decided to ask out of nowhere; hearing his name still made Carl jump, which was the only reason he pulled himself from his thoughts to listen to him. “What was it like growing up with this stick in the mud for a dad?”
Oh, this guy had a shit sense of humour.
“I’ll have you know, I was always fair and square,” Dad spoke for Carl, keeping his tone light; everybody was listening, even DC-obsessed-Abraham. “Lucky that Carl here was a good kid, real sweet; rarely needed any sort of talking to. Think the worst thing I ever caught him doing was trying to get into my gun locker because he saw a neighbour hit a cat with his car and never stopped to help it. Remember that?”
Yes, Carl tapped against his palm.
I wasn’t gonna shoot him dead, Daddy, was just gonna get his feet, Carl remembered saying, so many years ago, trying not to quiver under his Dad’s hard stare as he explained how he’d seen old Mr Mulligan hit Darcy’s (they were friends from school) tabby cat, Mudpie, and he hadn’t stopped to see if it was alive (it wasn’t), which was wrong. He remembered Dad trying not to crack a smile at his son’s early sense of justice, before sitting him down and berating him for so long about gun-safety that it had gone on until bedtime and given Carl an ear-ringing headache.
The only thing that Carl could relate to from the memory was that headache. That kid who’d gotten upset over a dead cat was dead, too. Long dead. The dad who had chided him seemed to be gone as well. Carl wouldn’t be surprised if he was pulled aside sometime soon for Dad to interrogate him about his walker-killing abilities. Would he let him carry a knife, or a gun?
Funny how times changed.
“Sounds like you take after each other,” Michonne piped up. She was quiet, Carl had noticed, compared to the rest of the group. Everybody seemed buddied up into pairs or trios and would whisper between themselves. Michonne seemed to enjoy the comfortable silence that Dad provided; Carl enjoyed it, too, even if it did send his mind wandering. It was easy enough to snap back, at least, his mind hyper-aware of everything around him, every shift of the nearby bodies. Waiting for a threat or punch that would never come, probably, not with Dad…Carl hoped.
“Ah, well, I tried my best to pass on my best qualities,” Dad replied gently, shrugging. He was abashedly trying to move on from those sorts of comparisons – he knew that they were both different people from before. Neither of them had figured out, yet, how different they were. That’d take some time to figure out.
For now, though, this would do. Dad was safe. That was the one thing that Carl had managed to ‘accept’ in the last few hours, sinking into the feeling like it was a warm bath. He tensed up when he felt Dad shift next to him, as if getting ready to stand up, but all he did was shuffle a bit to make it more comfortable for Carl to rest his head back on his shoulder. Carl felt kind of self-conscious when he dropped his head, aware of the glances he kept receiving. He could also feel that Dad was kind of tense.
OK? Carl traced.
Dad tapped his palm once. Yes. Followed by, YOU?
Yes, Carl tapped. Then, OK BUT ODD.
Yes, he felt Dad sigh. “I know that feeling,” he murmured, just to him. “We’ll figure it out, son. We will. It’ll take some time…I don’t know if I’ll ever wake up and not think this is a dream, not for a while,”
Carl almost smiled. That was one of the many, many reasons he couldn’t fall asleep. It was…surprisingly nice to have something explicitly in common, something that wasn’t to do with the past.
Carl slumped a fraction more of his weight against his Dad. He didn’t feel comfortable, really, just a little safer than ever before in the last two years. That was enough. It had to be enough. He just hoped that it would get easier, that it would last, because Carl knew he’d already lost the strength to move on if this ended.