A body hit the ground in slow motion and the gunfire noise seemed to dim down. I saw knees give out and scrape against the rough concrete of Terminus that lay beneath our toes. The hands went next in an attempt to brace themself. Their arms shook as they held themself up for a beat, then two, until they finally gave in to the darkness and collapsed. The head thudded softly in front of me and I saw eyes open. A glimmer of light reflected off of them as they saw their very last sight of the clouds just drifting above our heads, oblivious to the death surrounding us. The eyes closed.
Reality rushed back into my bones, shattering the silence. Looking up from the corpse, twenty men enclosed us in a semicircle of huddling, sweating bodies. Rick grunted and raised his gun to shoot, but it just clicked bulletless. Gareth's heels echoed on the pavement and he let a sword drag behind him causing a high- pitched scrrrrape that made my ears feel like bleeding.
"A shame really," his voice was low and gravelly. Pin pricks of fear lined my arms and a shudder whispered up my bare arms. His boots stopped in front of the person who I'd witnessed die and he turned the face towards us casually. He tsked the sight of the bullet hole that had entered through the right shoulder blade. "I really had hoped to save you all for a special event. It's not every day you met healthy people-healthy LIVING people that is."
He kicked the dead one on the ground in the face. Someone behind me gasped. Gareth gazed at us, his look of a predator. "It's a shame you had to try to escape." His head raised and his smile cut through me like a knife.
"Tie them up." I heard him say. My eyes scanned the body once more and finally the person's identity sprung into my head. That's the last thing I remember before the world faded to black and a boom registered inside my skull. I felt the floor rise to head level, or maybe I was just falling. The air was still and all thoughts left my brain. My heart froze in my chest.
It was the girl the Asian man, Glenn, had protected in the box car.
Maggie was dead.
YOU ARE READING
The Walking Dead: What Rests Ahead
RandomSet right where Season 4 of the TV show left off, Hannah Roberts must save the group from where they are held in Terminus. But in a world where the dead come back to life, it proves more difficult than it seemed. Will she be able to push down her pa...
