Chapter 4:
The two weeks spent walking towards Macon were one of the hardest things Clark has ever done. Oh, wait, correction, two and a half weeks of walking due to a small herd of ghouls that he had to dodge and two groups of bandits that chased him down, but he lost them thanks to Half-Light and the boosted instincts it provided.
The only food he had was a small bird that rested on his shoulder, thanks to Animal Lover. He cried when he ate it.
Finally reaching Macon, Clark couldn't do anything else but let out a nervous sigh as he looked at the destruction of the city. Macon, while smaller than Atlanta, was also filled with people. Logically, he knew his cousins' families remaining while everyone else died was small. Almost improbable.
But Clark Rogers needed hope.
He needed a goal to chase. Otherwise, he'd be no better than the ghouls roaming the street. The only difference between them would be that while one had a pulse, the others didn't.
He looked around for a few moments at the street, spotting a TV store that had its front window broken by someone who threw a rock, a rundown pharmacy a little down the street, and more stores and buildings. He shifted his position, turning to look the other way from his covered window, turning to spot his favorite movie theatre, also rundown.
There was even a ghoul banging on one of its outside walls.
The apartment he'd found was on the first floor of a squat brick building two blocks from the theatre, and the moment he pushed the door open, the smell hit him like a wall.
Clark gagged. Hard.
You'd think being surrounded by decaying bodies would make the other bad smells seem like nothing. But the weird thing about human adaptation was that at some point, you just tune the smell out.
His empty stomach lurched, and his eyes went dazed for a moment. He genuinely considered sleeping on the street instead.
He didn't, because the street would kill him faster than the smell would.
He breathed through his mouth and stepped inside.
It was small. A one-bedroom, the kind of place that felt cramped even when it was furnished and lived-in. Now it was just gutted- the previous tenants or the looters after them had stripped it down to the bones.
The kitchen cabinets hung open and empty, drawers pulled out and left on the floor. The couch had been shoved aside, one of its cushions missing entirely. A bookshelf lay face down near the closed window that Clark immediately opened to air the place out, its contents gone, though a single mug sat inexplicably on top of the kitchen counter like someone had forgotten it mid-pack or used it before leaving.
The bathroom was the source of the smell. He knew before he looked, but he looked anyway, and immediately wished he hadn't.
No water meant no flushing.
Someone- multiple someones, probably, given the timeline- had kept using the toilet anyway out of necessity, and the result was exactly what it was.
He shut the bathroom door. Then he took one of his spare shirts from his bag, tore a strip from the hem, and tied it around the lower half of his face.
It helped. Barely.
He checked the bedroom. A bare mattress on the floor, no frame, a window facing the alley that he could crack for airflow without exposing himself to the street. Manageable. He pushed the mattress against the wall below the window for later and went back to the living room, where the air was slightly less offensive now.
Then, and only then, with the door barricaded by the shoved couch and the strip of shirt tied around his nose and mouth, Clark Rogers allowed himself to stop after days.
Really stop.
And his body immediately filed its complaints.
His legs didn't so much ache as simply exist at a frequency of constant, low pain that had become so familiar he'd stopped registering it as pain and started registering it as just being there.
His lower back was worse- a deep, grinding stiffness from two and a half weeks of sleeping in cars, on floors, folded into whatever small space presented itself. He hadn't had a real stretch in days because a real stretch meant making noise.
But those were minor things that he got used to.
The hunger was not minor.
Two and a half weeks of berries, one small bird, and boiled river water had left him hollowed out in a way that went beyond his stomach. He could feel it in his hands as they shook.
His body had already cannibalized itself, eating away at his muscles and fats and whatever else that remained.
His cheekbones sat higher than they used to, which he'd noticed in a car mirror three days back and promptly stopped thinking about. His clothes were looser. His belt was on its last notch.
When he swallowed, there was nothing to swallow, but a thorn-like feeling. There's so much the ring of Stoneplate could do. Yeah, it gave him the strength to face hardships and was the only reason why he even reached Macon in the first place, but at some point, even after surpassing your limiters, you could only go so far before stopping without food and water.
He sat down against the wall for a moment to rest, knees up, and let his head fall back with a dull thud. The ceiling of the apartment was water-stained, a brown ring spreading from one corner like a slow tide. He stared at it, and he was doing that thing again.
The process of starvation, where you'd go dazed and just stare at something while your brain shuts down.
His eyelids grew heavy and…
He knew…
Knew… that…
If he slept…
He wouldn't… wake up…
Would it be wrong of him… to let go?
To give up? He was so tired… and so much pain…
Sometimes… he'd hallucinate that he was seeing his parents… Like right now.
He was in their… home…
He was in their home.
The kitchen smelled like butter and something sweet, maybe the banana pancakes his mom made on Saturdays, the ones she'd learned from her mother and refused to write down because she said a recipe like that lived in your hands, not on paper.
Clark was at the dining table. The good one, the round one with the small chip on the edge that his dad had caused, moving it during one of his parents' arguments and never quite living down.
His cheek was resting on his forearm, and the wood was warm under him, and the morning light was coming through the kitchen window in that specific, golden, unhurried way it only ever did on days when there was nowhere to be.
He could hear the stove. The soft, rhythmic sound of something being turned over in a pan.
His mom was humming. He couldn't make out the song, but it didn't matter. The sound of it was enough. It filled the kitchen the way warmth fills a room, quietly and completely, and Clark felt his shoulders drop in a way they hadn't in-
He didn't know how long.
"Still half asleep?" His dad's voice, from somewhere behind him. The familiar rustle of a newspaper, because his dad was one of the last people on earth who still read a physical newspaper and considered that a point of personal pride.
Clark didn't answer. He didn't want to. Answering meant being awake, and being awake meant the morning starting, and he wanted to stay here, in this specific moment, for just a little longer.
His mom set something down on the table near his elbow. The soft ceramic clink of a glass of orange juice.
"Clark." Her voice was gentle. It was always gentle in the mornings. "Sit up, baby. Food's almost ready."
He made a noise that wasn't quite a word.
"Clark."
He shifted. Turned his face further into his arm.
The humming resumed. The newspaper turned a page. Outside the window, a bird was doing something in the backyard and singing loudly, something small and ordinary and completely inconsequential, and Clark could hear it, and the stove, and his dad's quiet breathing, and the particular silence of a house that was full of people who loved each other and weren't saying anything because they didn't need to.
He hadn't realized how loud that silence was until now.
His mom touched the back of his head in that loving manner she always did when he slept on the table. Just like she did in that nightmare when he pulled a trigger on her.
Her hand smoothed his black hair in that automatic, absent way she had, the way that meant she wasn't even thinking about it, just doing it because he was there and he was hers.
"Sit up."
Clark sat up.
And the kitchen was gone.
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
|Against All Odds II — You pushed past your last limiter.|
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
The kitchen dissolved back into water-stained ceiling and brown rot and the particular smell of an apartment that had been used as a toilet for weeks, and his mother's hand became a stranger's fingers pressed to the side of his neck.
Clark's eyes barely opened.
They didn't focus. Not right away. The ceiling swam, and then the light, gray and diffuse through the cracked window, and then two shapes that his brain kept trying to resolve into something recognizable and kept failing.
He could feel that he was forgetting something important, but he wasn't sure what it was.
[Intermediate Physics]
|Uncommon Skill|
You are learned enough in the field of Physics to be a professor, you know how physics works and how they interact with objects. You can spot and understand how most phenomena interact with the laws of the universe.
He was hit with a headache as someone was talking-
Two someones. The sounds had shape and rhythm, the cadence of words, but the meaning kept sliding off him like water off glass. He caught fragments. A tone that was low, careful, and male. Another that was quicker, shorter, female maybe.
Something touched his lips. The rim of something.
Water.
His body knew before his brain did. His throat worked automatically, swallowing, and the water was warm and tasted faintly of plastic, and he didn't care, he didn't care at all, it was the best thing he'd ever tasted in his entire life, and he wanted more of it immediately.
He tried to say so.
What came out was not a word.
The rim pulled back anyway, controlled, measured, and he understood distantly that whoever was holding it knew what they were doing. Too much too fast on a stomach this empty would just come back up.
His hands, he noticed, were in his lap. He hadn't moved them there. They'd been moved for him.
He thought about being alarmed by that.
He couldn't find the energy.
The fingers at his neck shifted, checking something, then withdrew. The two shapes said something to each other above him, and Clark let his head fall back against the wall and stared at the ceiling and breathed, and the water sat in his stomach like a small, warm anchor, and for the first time in two and a half weeks, he stopped moving.
—-------------------------------------
Lee Everett had seen a lot of things in the past few weeks that he was going to spend a long time not thinking about.
He was getting good at that. The not thinking about it. Carley said it was compartmentalization. Kenny said it was survival. And he figured those were the same thing.
"You're doing it again," Carley said, from beside him.
"Doing what?"
Lee glanced at her sideways. She had her camera bag over one shoulder in case they found anything and her gun at her hip, and she was smiling in that small, private way she had that she probably didn't realize was as readable as it was. Or maybe she did. With Carley, it was genuinely hard to tell.
"I'm being cautious," he said defensively.
"You're brooding."
"I'm being cautiously brooding then."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh, quiet enough not to carry, and looked back at the street. The block was mostly quiet, which in Macon meant mostly dead, which was a distinction that had stopped feeling strange about a week ago.
Lee was about to say something- he wasn't sure what, something that would've kept the moment going a little longer between them, because moments like this one were in short supply, and he was starting to understand the value of them- when Carley's hand came up.
Flat. Stop.
Lee stopped.
Her eyes were fixed on the brick apartment building across the street, first floor, third window from the left. He followed her line of sight and caught it.
Movement.
Just a shape, indistinct through dirty glass. But it was there, and then the window shifted, pushed outward from the inside, slowly, carefully- and a figure leaned out just far enough to look at the street below.
Not a walker.
Those things didn't open windows.
Lee and Carley held very still and watched while still being careful of their surroundings.
The figure didn't spot them. It scanned left, then right, then pulled back inside and let the window stay open as if they were going through a motion instead of intent.
Neither of them moved for another ten seconds.
"One person," Carley said, barely above a breath.
"Looked like it."
"Could be bait."
"Could be."
She looked at him. He looked at her.
"We check it out," they said, more or less together.
—---------------------------------
The entrance to the building was a glass door with one pane already gone, the other still intact and hanging slightly open. Lee went in first, Carley a step behind, her gun unholstered, and to his left, the way they'd worked it out without ever quite discussing it.
Her eyes went right. His went left. The lobby was empty, a bank of mailboxes along one wall, most of them hanging open, a dead plant in a pot by the stairs
The smell hit them both on the second step up.
Carley's expression didn't change much. Just a small tightening around the eyes.
Lee breathed through his mouth and kept moving.
The first-floor hallway was dim, one of the overhead lights still stuttering weakly, two others dead. And there were walkers. Or had been. Five of them, spread across the corridor in various states of permanent stillness, and Lee slowed down without stopping.
He crouched by the nearest one.
The head was split. Not bashed in, not shot. Split, the way you'd split wood, clean and deep, like something had come down on it with a sharpened edge, and the force behind it had been deliberate. Controlled.
He looked at the next one. Same.
Carley was already moving down the hall, reading them the way she read everything, quickly and without fuss. "All of them," she said quietly.
"All of them," he confirmed.
They stood in the hallway for a moment, looking at five dead walkers and the same wound on every one of them, and Lee thought about what kind of person was upstairs, and what kind of weeks they'd had to have lived through to do this as cleanly as this.
Carley pointed to the second door on the left. The carpet outside it was scuffed, recently, and there was a faint dark smear on the doorframe that Lee chose not to examine too closely.
She pulled a pick from her jacket pocket- Lee didn't ask where she'd gotten it or when she'd learned- and crouched at the lock.
Twenty seconds.
Less.
The door swung inward, nudging the couch that had been pushed up against it from the inside, and they both went still in the doorframe.
The smell was considerably worse in here. Lee kept his face neutral through an act of genuine will.
Carley made a very quiet, very controlled sound behind him that was not quite a gag.
The apartment was stripped. Gutted. A torn strip of fabric near the bathroom door, a bare mattress shoved against one wall, drawers pulled out and left on the floor. The window above the mattress was cracked open and doing very little.
And in the corner of the living room, half-folded against the wall was a kid.
Lee's first thought was Clementine, which was his first thought about most things these days, the reflex he couldn't turn off. The kid was roughly her age, maybe a year younger or older; he couldn't tell, and the resemblance ended there, but it didn't matter. The thought had already happened.
He was thin. Not just survival-thin like them. His clothes were hanging off him. His face, under what looked like a torn strip of fabric rigged as a makeshift mask, was all angles, the hollows under his cheekbones deep enough to cast shadows.
He was breathing. Lee checked for that first, automatically. Shallow, but there.
In his lap, loose in fingers that had stopped gripping, was a pipe and a pistol- safety off.
Lee crossed the room quietly and crouched down slowly. He pressed two fingers to the side of the kid's neck, feeling for the pulse, and found it- weak, thready, but present.
"He's alive," he said, slowly pulling the safety pin and then taking the pipe and pistol while Carley went around the apartment once more to confirm no one else was present, before returning.
Her hand was already moving, the small canteen from her bag uncapped, and she holstered her weapon. She pulled the makeshift mask down carefully, tipped the canteen to his lips, and controlled the pour with the patience of someone who'd done this before, or had watched enough to know how.
The kid swallowed. Didn't wake up. Swallowed again.
"How old do you think?" Carley asked, her voice low.
"I- don't know…" because that was easier to say than admit that if he hadn't saved Clementine, would she be in the same situation as this boy?
Carley looked at him over the kid's head, taking a bite from her ration and chewing it, before spitting it out and feeding the boy, and he could see her doing the same math he was.
"We're not leaving him here," she said, looking back to the boy's open eyes without a sign of life. She made him drink another sip, controlled, while Lee moved his arms to make it more comfortable. It wasn't a question.
Lee looked at the kid again. The rings on his hands. The pack by his hip was worn through at both straps. The way he'd barricaded the door and opened a window and found the corner with the best sightline before he'd gone down.
Whoever this kid was, he'd been doing this alone. She watched as Carley took another bite, chewing and making sure the jerky was soft enough, and then fed it to the boy.
"No," Lee said. "We're not."
======================================
AN: Hello everyone. I hope you have a good morning- or evening, wherever you are.
As promised, I did a little timeskip for this chapter, immediately placing Clark in Macon. Though in a very nerfed situation.
The reason being, for in-story reason: He's alone, depressed, pushing the trauma of killing his parents before they could turn, and on top of that, pulling the trigger on others who were bitten and didn't want to turn and requested to be killed before it. Like John Walker in the first chapter. He hadn't had a good sleep for days and weeks before the outbreak. The stress and anxiety of it all are accumulating and sapping his energy, on top of being on the move constantly. And many more little things that add up, such as thirst and food.
The animal lover treat would also be somewhat useless for now since nothing in the city would survive due to people eating them.
Outside of story, I don't like overly cocky and OP MCs. I like mine to have somewhat a normal mindset and be vulnerable. He can and will make mistakes, and his actions have consequences. Like, why not try to see if he could find a car with the keys in. Yeah, maybe they won't have fuel, but he could syphon from other cars. Gas expires around 5 months later and he still had time. Or at least, find a bycyle and pedal his way to Macon.
Choises that MC, a 17 years old native boy/man, didn't know he had and didn't think about it (I didn't think about it either...)
On another note, I don't know if it's a good idea, but I'll be doing a little bit of world building here:
The reason Lee and Carley are out and scouting for supplies is two reason: First to mainly flirt and have some time for themselves from the others in the motel. Second, to find supplies before they run out.
Hopefully, you guys enjoyed this chapter and a few shed some tears.
Have a good day!