Chapter 11:
"I said no," Lilly repeated it the same way she'd said it the first time. Not louder, not softer. Just placed it back down in front of him like something that had already been decided. "You're not leaving this lot."
Clark looked at her as if she had sprouted horns on her head and a tail from behind her. He'd been looking at her like that since she said it the first time, and he had asked- kindly and gently- to repeat what she said.
"I'm going to hunt," Clark said. He kept his voice level because level was the right register for this. Not aggressive. Not defensive. Just factual. And also because he wasn't asking permission from her. "We just ate through a significant portion of what I brought in. I can replace it."
"You can replace it." Lilly's tone didn't change. "A teenager who showed up yesterday can replace two days' worth of group rations." A beat. "Alone. In a walker-infested stretch of Georgia."
'Walker?!- wait, not important.'
"Yes."
"And you want me to just open the gate and let you walk out." She gestured at the barricade, the cars, the trash bins, at everything her group had built to survive for the past three months.
"Yes."
"No." She said it a third time. Three times made it a policy. "You've been here one day. I don't know you. I don't know where you came from, I don't know what group you're running with, and I don't know what you want from us."
Clark's jaw tightened, the first visible sign he'd given that this was actually touching anything. "I'm not running with anyone."
"Ha! Please, you're telling me that you- a kid- have survived this long without being part of a group?!" She pointed at one of the motel rooms, "Duck could make up a better lie on the spot!"
He exhaled through his nose, controlling the headache that was slowly building up from taking a chunk of Carley's state, a controlled breath that his instinct used to recalibrate. She wasn't wrong, in the technical sense.
In the new world, paranoia was just risk assessment with better PR. He understood that. He'd been operating on it himself for three months.
That didn't mean she wasn't also being completely unreasonable.
"Let's say I am part of some group," he saw her scoff, "Why?" he asked, with a patience he was actively manufacturing. "If I were scouting for another group, why would I bring food? Why would I spend the morning giving away my resources for people I was planning to sell out?" He spread his hands, "I had nothing to gain from feeding you and everything to lose if my hypothetical group found out I'd been handing supplies- precious supplies to strangers."
"Unless the food was the point," Lilly said. "Trust-building. Buy your way in, learn the layout, head count, resources, and defenses. Then go back and report-"
"Why would I waste my time doing all of that if I could just attract a horde of ghouls to this place and let it tear you to pieces?!" Clark's voice rose, his body tensing.
"Lilly." Lee's voice came in from the side, careful, the tone of a man who had been watching the temperature of the room and had decided it needed managing. "He brought us food. Real food, and-"
"I know what he brought." Lilly's eyes didn't leave Clark. "I also know we don't know him. And I know that in our new world, everything comes at a cost. His food has cost us something." She paused. "I'm trying to figure out what!"
The parking lot had gone quiet in the particular way of spaces where everyone present had opinions they were keeping to themselves. Mark was standing near the fire with his hands in his pockets and the look of a man who had learned when not to speak. Ben was by the motel wall, arms wrapped around himself, eyes moving between Lilly and Clark with the expression of someone who had been in the middle of too many of these and had stopped expecting them to end well.
Lee and Carley were standing slightly apart from each other, but closer than friends. And Clementine, she, like Ben, had taken a step back. Because no matter how much Lilly worried and sometimes snapped at others, she had the group's well-being in her heart.
Sometimes, during her lookouts, she'd find her dazed and looking at Duck rambling her ears off with a gentle smile that would get wiped off as soon as she noticed her looking. One time, Clementine would swear that she had seen Lilly hide a laugh at one of Mark's lame jokes.
"Fine." Clark let the word out flat, final-sounding without being final. "You don't trust me. That's your right." He met her eyes. "But I'm going out."
"No-"
"I wasn't asking."
The temperature dropped a degree. Lilly's expression didn't change, but something behind it did, shifting from defensive to something with more edges.
"You walk out that gate without my say-"
"Then what?" Clark asked it simply, because it was a simple question. "You shoot me? You lock the gate or kick me out?" He tilted his head.
"I'm telling you what I'm doing, as a courtesy, because I figured you'd want to know."
He had probably just made everything worse.
"The heck you will-" Larry's voice came in from the left, the volume of a man who had been waiting for his turn and had decided it had arrived. He stepped forward from where he'd been standing near the RV, big and deliberate about taking up space, his face already carrying the particular coloring of someone whose blood pressure had opinions. "You come in here one day, eat our food, sleep in our beds-"
"I brought the food," Clark said, without heat.
"-and now you want to walk out whenever you feel like it, like you run this place." Larry jabbed a finger in his direction. The finger was the size of a sausage and had a lot of "empty" conviction behind it.
"Let me tell you something, kid. I don't know what hole you crawled out of, or what sad story you fed Carley to get through that gate, but you don't run anything here. You don't have a say. You're a stranger with a pipe and a lot of mouth, and if you think you can come in here and start throwing your weight around-"
"How was the meat?"
Larry stopped.
The parking lot stopped with him.
Clark hadn't raised his voice. If anything, his voice had dropped slightly. He looked at Larry with an expression that wasn't hostile and wasn't warm and wasn't anything particularly complex. Because it had only been one day, yet Clark was sick of all this.
It seemed he had bad luck associating with groups. Because his first group turned out to be a cult and cannibalizing sons of bitches who captured others to eat them during orgies, and the second one being… this- whatever it was.
"What?" Larry said.
"The meat." Clark gestured loosely toward the pan that Carley had cooked on, still sitting near the fire's edge. "Rabbit and squirrel. Carley cooked it this morning. You had some." He paused. "How was it?"
Larry's face was doing several things at once.
"And the juice," Clark continued, with the same flat evenness. "The bottles I left by the fire. Fruit wine, watered down. You drank one." Another pause. "How was that?"
The silence that followed was the specific silence of a room that had arrived at a point it hadn't expected to reach and wasn't sure what to do now that it was there.
Larry's mouth opened.
Closed.
Clark waited.
"That's not-" Larry started.
"I'm not saying it to score points." Clark's voice stayed level. He meant that, which was maybe why it landed the way it did. "I'm saying it because you've spent the last two minutes telling me I don't contribute anything, and I want to make sure we're working from the same facts." He looked at Lilly. "I gave MY food this morning to YOUR group. I'll bring more WHEN- not IF- I go out. That's the entire offer. There's no angle. There's no group. There's just me and the woods and the fact that your people and someone I care about-" he pointed at Lee and then Carley "are hungry."
He watched Lee and Carley glance at each other. He watched Mark look at the ground the way Mark seemed to do when something had landed, and he didn't know what to do with it. He watched Ben continue to look like a person bracing for impact and curling himself as if he wanted to stop existing in the present.
Lilly's expression had moved into something that was harder to read than before. Less defensive, but not open. The face of someone running the calculation again and not loving any of the outputs.
"I'm not your enemy," Clark said, to her specifically. "And I'm not your subordinate." He kept his eyes on hers, made sure it wasn't a threat, just a statement of fact. "But I'm also not going to stand here and argue with someone who just ate my food about whether I'm allowed to go get more of it." He took a breath. "I'm going out. I'll be back by early afternoon. If something happens to me out there, that's my problem." He paused. "If something happens here while I'm gone, I hope you've got enough people to deal with it."
The last part wasn't intended as a threat either. It came out closer to one than he'd planned, and he saw Carley's eyes narrow very slightly, which was her version of a wince.
He turned toward the gate.
"Clark." Carley's voice. He stopped without deciding to. It was an involuntary stop, the kind his body made before his brain weighed in, and he filed that information away under things to examine later and preferably never. He turned just his head.
She was looking at him with the expression she had when she was deciding whether to say the practical thing or the real thing, knowing that he'd be using his abilities to help. She had no doubt that he'd bring back something. Still, she worried.
"Be careful."
He held her gaze for a second.
"Yeah," he said.
He pushed the trash bin aside himself and slipped through the gap, and didn't look back. But he still felt all their eyes bore on him.
The woods swallowed him in about thirty seconds, and it felt good.
He made it about forty meters from the motel's sight line before he stopped, set his backpack against a tree, and let out a breath that had been waiting since approximately the fourth sentence of that conversation.
His hands weren't shaking. He checked, because he checked those things now as a matter of habit, and they weren't.
He rolled his shoulders, rolling them to get the tension out that had settled there during the argument, and stretched his neck once, left then right.
The Horseshoe Necklace was doing its quiet work at the edges of his awareness, that background hum of stamina and leg strength that had been building since he'd put it on. His legs felt good. His body felt like it was running about seventy percent, which wasn't a hundred but was considerably better than the five he'd been averaging when he'd first arrived in Macon.
He'd be better with food. He knew that. Soylent Green kept the baseline, but actual calories from actual prey did something that plankton in a tin couldn't do, and his body had gotten very specific in the past few weeks about what it wanted from him. At least, his instinct had.
Cat Form wanted out, or he wanted out of his human form; he couldn't quite tell. But he could feel it at the edges of his awareness, the particular restlessness that came when he'd been in human form for too long, and the cat in him had started to notice and was filing its own complaints.
If he thought about it, he was spending more time as a cat than as a human, which is why Clark never thought about it.
He checked his watch. Mark's watch. He'd glanced at it three times already since putting it on, not because he needed the time but because it was there and it worked and having a thing that worked was worth more than its function.
7:04 AM.
He'd told them early afternoon. That gave him six hours.
He found a spot- a bush, where he could bury and hide his backpack and let the change take him.
The world grew. That was always the first thing. Not that he shrank, exactly, but that everything else expanded, the trees becoming genuinely large, the root systems he navigated becoming a landscape, the grass becoming a forest of its own at his eye level. His nose opened up in a way that human senses simply couldn't simulate, the air splitting into maybe thirty separate threads - earth, decay, something warm and moving to the north-northeast, bird droppings, water, the particular chemical signature of something small and frightened that had passed through here recently.
He filed all of it without effort.
His tail curled up behind him once, testing the air, and settled.
He started moving.
The first hour yielded three sparrows and a pigeon, all of which came to him with a docility that still surprised the human part of his brain even after weeks of practice. Animal Lover, a ticket that had come from killing his parents, didn't make hunting easier so much as it removed the hunting entirely. They simply... arrived.
Landed near him. Let themselves be reached for. It was the most efficient and the most uncomfortable thing his abilities did, and he'd made a private agreement with himself not to overthink it too closely while it was useful. He put that in his cooping mechanism cabinet and just closed it.
He ate the sparrows in cat form. This was the part he didn't talk about, even internally, if he could help it. The mechanics of it. The fact that it tasted good in a way that was purely animal and had nothing to do with seasoning or cooking or the social dimensions of eating. The particular satisfaction of it.
He stayed in cat form while the food digested, the way he'd learned to, because he'd made the mistake early on of shifting back before digestion completed and ending up with a full cat's stomach and a starving human's body, which was one of the more complicated sensations he'd experienced in an already complicated few months. The food translated. He'd worked out the rule empirically: stay in form, stay fed. Shift early, start over.
So he waited, curled in a patch of morning sun on a branch fourteen feet up, and let his body do what bodies did, and watched the forest with eyes that caught movement at a distance his human vision couldn't have managed.
Below him, a rabbit moved through the undergrowth.
Then two more behind it.
He didn't move yet. Let them settle. Animal Lover had a quality to it that was almost gravitational- they drifted toward him eventually, without knowing why, the way animals sometimes moved toward warm rocks. He'd learned to let them come rather than chase.
By 9:30, he'd added three rabbits to the count.
The squirrels were almost comically easy. They came to the base of his tree in ones and twos, sat there in the particular upright posture of squirrels who had decided something was interesting, and waited. He came down the tree once, twice, seven times total. Seven squirrels.
The turkey was luck, or the Animal Lover was doing something more than its stated function. He heard it first, the particular sound a turkey made when it was moving through underbrush and hadn't yet decided it was being watched. It was large and dark-feathered, and it came through the gap between two oaks at 11:45 and stopped approximately three feet from where he was sitting, looked at him with that specific turkey expression of focused stupidity, and did not move.
He stared at it.
It stared back.
"Okay," he thought, and his voice came out as a chirp that cats let out to trick birds, which was its own kind of surreal experience, and the turkey did not react.
He shifted back to human form, because at this point he'd eaten enough to sustain both forms through the return trip, and there was no dignified way to transport a turkey of that size in cat form. With a pet that made him shiver, Clark had the turkey following after him as he went to his piling haul.
He checked the watch.
12:47 PM.
He shouldered the backpack, redistributed the weight, and cut the tuckey's head off to let it bleed out with his sharpened pipe. It took him almost half an hour, but once it was over, he turned back toward the motel.
…
…
…
He came back through the tree line at 1:28 PM.
The gate was open before he reached it- Clementine on lookout on the walkway above, which surprised him slightly and then didn't. She wasn't the same age as Kenny Jr, so it made sense to have her work and contribute around the place. He came through into the parking lot with three rabbits tied together at his belt, seven squirrels on his pack, the turkey under his arm like a briefcase, and five birds in his free hand that were hanging by their "legs?"
Clark didn't know what to call that… Feets?
The parking lot, which had been doing whatever parking lots do on quiet afternoons, went quiet in a different way.
Kenny had emerged from his room at some point, sleep-rumpled and squinting, and was standing by the fire with a cup of something that probably wasn't coffee anymore. He looked at what Clark was carrying. Then he looked at Clark. Then back at the haul.
"Huh," Kenny said.
Lee stepped forward, expression full of shock and confusion, mouth trying to form words but failing each time.
Mark was already moving toward him with his hands slightly raised, the instinct of someone who wanted to take some of that weight and was trying to figure out where to start.
"Here." Clark offloaded the rabbits to Kenny, the birds to Mark, and set the turkey down on the flat hood of the nearest car with considerably more dignity than it deserved. He shrugged the pack off and set it by his feet to unhock the squirrels and give it to Kenny again.
"How did you-" Mark started.
"Where did you-" Kenny was trying a different approach.
Lee just looked at him.
Clark held up a hand. He had been thinking about this moment for approximately two hours, in the specific way that he thought about things when he had time and a grievance to sit with, and he had decided on an approach that was probably petty and definitely correct.
He pointed.
Not at the three of them. Past them. At the motel walkway, Lilly was standing at the railing with her arms crossed and an expression that was working very hard at being neutral, even though he could see her eyes widened in shock. Larry was visible behind her, one hand on the railing, doing less work on the neutral expression.
"They don't get any until I get an apology."
The parking lot went quiet in a third entirely different way.
Kenny's mouth curved in a direction that wasn't quite a smile but was in the neighborhood of one. Mark's eyes went to the walkway and then very carefully back to Clark and then to the ground. Lee made a sound that was a genuine disapproval.
"Clark." Lee's voice had that managed quality. "Let's not-"
"I'm not asking for much," Clark said. He looked up at the walkway, and Lilly looked back at him, and neither of them moved. "I said I'd go. I went. I came back. I brought enough to last the group at least a week if we're careful." He let the arithmetic sit for a moment. "I'd just like the record to reflect that."
Larry said something under his breath from the walkway that Clark couldn't pick up, but by the twitch of Lilly's eyebrows, even she looked to be annoyed with the man who was her father.
Guess he was a certified asshole.
Kenny looked at the turkey with the expression of a man finding hope at once. "Right." He picked it up off the hood of the car with energy and a giant smile. "Right, okay. Yeah." He looked up at the walkway.
"Lilly." His voice carried easily across the parking lot. "I wouldn't mind having a bigger share." He taunted, making Clark's smile a lot bigger. Even Carley, who had picked up on the commotion and came out of her room, looked overjoyed at his return with food, but that went down a lot faster when she noticed what he was doing.
Meanwhile, Lilly's expression moved through three things in rapid succession. None of them were happiness. The last one was something that might have been, in a different light and from a generous angle, resignation in the face of food.
She looked at Clark.
Her mouth was moving in that way that she was trying to raise her voice, but her pride and ego wouldn't let her. Until her father stood straight next to her, opening his vile mouth that Clark wanted to tear apart.
"I'm sorry." She gave Larry a look as the father turned towards the daughter, surprised and trying to stop her. "I'm sorry that I snapped at you and tried to keep you locked." She continued, telling her dad, "Stop, let it go." He begrudgingly turned on his heel and walked back to his little hiding hole.
"I accept your apology." Clark returned, cutting off the words that would continue if he didn't stop her. He had proved himself to the group and to the supposed-not-leader. "I don't like being told what to do. Especially not from someone I don't know, and they act as if they know everything." Clark explained, feeling like he should explain.
Because at the end of the day, she was right to worry about his intentions. Heck, she didn't know, but this was one of his strategies to get into the bandits' camp to make sure they had no prisoners before leading the horde at them. Though at the time, his rations were mostly chocolate bars or a can or two that he'd use to "sleep" for a night before heading out the next morning.
From her perspective, he was a nobody who had almost starved to death two months ago.
When two of her people helped him from being starved to death, the first thing he did was take one of them hostage and run away, putting her and the retrieving team at risk of getting bitten or shot.
The next time he came back, he was much healthier and with food that he wanted to share. Looking from her perspective, Clark agreed that it looked suspicious as heck.
So, he stopped her from continuing and owed her an apology as well.
"I'm sorry as well." Clark was surprised by the words coming to him more easily than he expected. "I should have done things differently."
A beat.
"Fair," she said.
He looked at where Larry had gone, and Lilly sighed with frustration and exhaustion.
"Fine." He turned back to Lee, Kenny, and Mark. "Let's start with the turkey."
He caught Carley in his peripheral vision as he moved toward the fire. She was standing to the side of all of it, arms folded loosely, and her expression had the quality of someone who had watched something unfold and had a lot of opinions about it and was going to share exactly none of them right now.
He met her eyes.
She raised an eyebrow.
He looked away first, which he was choosing not to read into, and made himself seem busy. When he heard Clementine's amused giggle from her lookout position, he didn't even dignify her with a look.
He didn't tell them how he'd done it.
He would. Eventually. He'd already told Carley, and Carley knowing meant the information had a shelf life, because Carley was practical and would eventually decide the group needed to know. He'd accepted that when he told her, which was why he'd told her and not someone else.
But not today. Today, he was still the stranger who had brought a turkey back from the woods, and he was going to let that be enough for one afternoon.
He worked alongside Kenny, Lee, and Mark through the early afternoon, cleaning and portioning and turning most of the meats they wouldn't be eating into jerky or smoking them over the fire. During the cleaning bit, Lilly had actually pushed her father towards them, and after ten minutes of just staring, he muttered two words that others didn't catch, but he did with Half Light. Instead of answering him verbally, he motioned to one of the seats close by to get him to work.
Duck came out at some point and immediately wanted to help and was redirected by Katjaa with the gentle but absolute authority of a woman who had raised a child and knew exactly which battles to choose.
Clementine watched from the lookout until Carley took over. He was aware of it the way he was aware of most things now- not intrusively, just noted and filed. When Carley freed her of her shift, she decided that she wanted to help.
Though why would she bring her seat next so close to him, confused him. Did she want favors because he brought more food than she'd ever seen? Because if so, she'd be sorely mistaken.
At some point, he looked down at the watch on his wrist. Mark's watch.
3:18 PM.
Everything seemed to be going well-
"So, where are you from?" The question raised both his and Lee's eyebrows. "United States." He answered-
He was surprised by Kenny and Lee choking on their laughter, Mark falling from his chair, and even Larry scoffed- "Idiot-" leaving the old man's lip, who looked no better than his wrinkled, hairy balls-
'Breath, Clark. Breath…'
When he turned, Clementine was back at glaring at him. Though it was more playful than when they met.
========================================
AN: So, wait... Did I post a chapter yesterday?
*Comes back* Yes I did... Damn, I forgot. Memory isn't working correctly anymore.
I thought I rested the full day yesterday since I only uploaded one chapter and forgot.
Anyway, yeah, so this chapter and the following would focus on two things: Showing Clark's daily routine after joining a group.
And this also means to show how his interaction with people would go.
I'm going through different TWD walkthroughs right now to remember what happened in the games and how I can change them.
The goal of the following chapter would be Lee and Clementine.
Idk what else to say. Anyway, hope you guys had fun reading this. I'll be back today with another chapter. In around 3-4 hours. So stay tuned!
EDIT: Please let me cook with the characters you all want dead before you tear me to pieces!