EXTINCTION EVENT | CARL GRIMES

t w o ↣ vendetta

"It's weird, I guess." I said, making direct eye contact with a female walker that's growling at me through the fence. She'd be pretty if not already dead. "But I get it. You guys are used to it." I say, walking up to the walker and getting a closer look at her.

"You seem much more used to the idea than your friends are." Carol speaks up. I guess it's kind of an 'elephant in the room' situation for these people to live with prisoners.

"They're not my friends." I mutter, barely recognizing the world around me. "The world did end. The other girls held out some naive hope. I didn't." I say, looking to the ground, finalizing the concept.

Glenn and Carol nod to each other, both of them thinking the same thing. Me being on the outside of their thought process.

"Well," Glenn says. He hands over the metal rod. "Don't tell anyone about this."

After the offense that the man unknowingly caused me, I decide take it from him.

His words only solidify my every suspicion about the group that roams around my cell block. The boundaries they keep between us are now proven real.

I hesitantly ready the rod, poking it between the links in the fence, lining it with the milky, reanimated eye.

☆

A few hours ago—after agreeing to keep our little rendezvous a secret—Glenn and Carol snuck me back inside the cell block, where I was once again greeted with more unpleasant words.

Gianna, Rosa and I were to remove the dead bodies of people we knew, and burn them. All so we could migrate to cell block A, and keep our distance from the others.

"We had an agreement." Rick says, coming face to face with a distraught Gianna.

I stand back, watching the conversation happen, not wanting to ruffle the other group's feathers. Pissing them off is the difference between life and death nowadays.

Rosa and Gianna remain too disturbed after only a few hours in our own cell block. I can't say that I blame them.

"Please mister, we know that." She started. "We made a deal, but you have to understand." She points back to our cell block.

"We can't live in that place another minute. You follow me?" She begs. "All the bodies—people we knew. Their blood and brains—everywhere."

Through her words, the scowl on Rick's face keeps its place.

"Please don't make us stay in there." Rosa adds, breaking her snarky facade to show the desperation that we all feel to leave the place.

The man says nothing, but offers a slight grimace of a reaction.

"I told you guys this was a waste of time." I speak up. Before coming out here, I'd warned the girls that the others think we were dangerous and want nothing to do with us. And once again, I'm proven right.

"You either stay in your cell block, or you can hit the road." Rick states, leaving Gianna and Rosa a frantically scared mess.

"Come on, Rick." The black man states.

"Are you serious? You want these people living in the room next to you?" Rick asks the man in a matter-of-fact tone. "They'll just be waiting for a chance to grab our weapons."