It was the same dream as before...
...
He called out to the tiny figure as she shuffled by the car he was lying half underneath.
"Little girl?"
Her robe flapped in the gentle breeze, the torn and stained teddy bear in one grimy little hand drug the ground. Her grungy bunny slippers scraped the asphalt, every schit, schit shivering along nerves already fraying at the seams. His shuddering breath stirred the moist silence.
He froze, his breath congealing in his chest as he waited for one of them to suddenly lurch out of nowhere. None of the infected came out to attack. Not that it mattered to the little girl who continued on her way to whatever destination she had in mind.
Where she was going, he didn't know. Who she hoped to find, he couldn't say. All he knew was she never stopped to look around, never changed that slow, shuffling gait.
And never gave him any sort of acknowledgment whatsoever.
Rick stood and circled around the car as quickly as he could, his heart pumping with dread and a worry that stemmed from paternal instincts set to maximum. His chest throbbed with every move, his still healing flesh screaming out in violent protest of his harried movements. He ignored his own discomfort and focused on the child desperately in need of his help.
A voice in the back of his head whispered to him that something wasn't right, that she wasn't acting as a normally functioning child should be acting during a catastrophe of this magnitude and urged him to tread carefully. He kept that warning in mind. The last thing he needed was to find himself in a tight spot.
No help would be forthcoming in this new world. Everything had changed in the six weeks since he was shot. Danger lurked around every corner. He chose to ignore his misgivings and called out again to the small girl slowly stumbling away from him.
"Little girl?" Nothing. Not even a flinch. It was as if she no longer remembered spoken language. He ignored the bubbles of warning in his gut and continued his pursuit. "I'm a policeman."
God, he thought as he took in her disheveled state. She can't be more than nine or ten. He didn't dare think about where her folks were. He didn't even contemplate what might have happened to them. Ah, but he knew what happened to her family, he was just trying to ignore the truth by not acknowledging it.
He had no clue about what horrors she might have seen, or how long it had been since the undead had torn through the small camp and left her on her own. He shook off the feeling that he should back away, now, while he still had a chance.
That was the act of a coward.
Lori might have accused him of being many things, but a yellow-bellied dog wasn't one of 'em. No, he was a cop — and a father, he added silently, and there was a child who was in need of his comfort and assistance. He held one hand out in supplication, ignoring the way it trembled and drew a breath before again calling to her.
"Little girl." She kept moving away from him, her gait an unnaturally rolling one that had the hair on his arms and along the back of his neck shivering with rising alarm and dread. "Don't be afraid. Okay? Little girl."
There was nothing, not so much as a turn of her head or a shift of her body to indicate she had even heard him. He found himself wondering if she was deaf. Her ignoring him would then make sense. He couldn't be sure, though, and he didn't want to add to her trauma by just reaching out and grabbing hold of her.
"Little girl?" Desperation echoed in every syllable. "I'm a policeman." He chanted the words over and over and over until he was almost hoarse. "Can you hear me? I'm a policeman. Little girl..."
She stopped finally. He held his breath as she slowly turned to face him, praying with every fiber of his being he'd just see a traumatized child staring at him. A roaring filled his ears as he took in her crimson-stained pajamas, the blood, bits of bone and flesh and drool dripping from her drooping mouth and staining her braces.
A primal hunger, much like that of a half-starved animal, burst to life in her jaundiced eyes. A shuddering breath burst from him as he backed up a few steps, his hand already going to the gun in his holster.
She started to growl, a low, almost animalistic sound. She started to move towards him in a jerky, swaying sort of motion, her small fingers curved into gore encrusted talons he knew she'd use to rip his flesh apart the second she got hold of him. Even now, her slack mouth was making chewing motions.
As if she already could taste his flesh in her mouth, in her throat. Disgust ripped through him and for a moment he thought he was going to be violently ill. He bore down, shoved the greasy swirl of nausea back and rapidly searched for a way to get away.
I'm gonna have to kill her.
The thought horrified him as much as it sickened him. The truth of it, though, was hard to deny. Not when the evidence was lumbering right towards him with murder stamped upon a sweetly angelic face. Operating solely on his cop instincts now, he fumbled for the Colt revolver strapped to his hip, wrestling it free of the holster even as he swallowed back the bile that surged, hot and foamy, into his mouth.
He understood what he had to do and hated himself for it. His eyes watered and he had to blink them twice before he could focus upon that thin figure lurching after him. His hand shook, once, as he lifted the gun. His only thought was about how she could be one of his boy's friends, she could be one of their siblings, she could even be a classmate of his.
And now he was going to have to put her down.
What choice did he have, though? She was no longer a human child. She was a killing machine that could not be reasoned with, a killer who needed to be stopped before she could hurt anybody else with her madness, an animal he needed to euthanize so that she could not harm anyone else.
It was for that reason, and that one reason alone that he would do the unthinkable, the unconscionable, the unforgivable.
He'd do it because it was the kindest thing for him to do. He'd do it because it was all he could do. It was the only goddamn thing this world had left him able to do.
He raised the revolver as she lunged at him, his vision shattering and his heart becoming nothing more than a small black stone sitting inside his chest cavity.
"I'm sorry," he murmured as he cocked the hammer. "I'm so sorry that this happened to you."
And he squeezed the trigger...
...
Rick Grimes awoke to the cannon-blast of thunder and the jagged rip of lightning. Awoke to terror and the lingering grief over what he'd been forced to do less than a day ago. He sat up with a gasp that quickly turned into a groan as his still-healing chest wound throbbed.
His blood pumped; pulsed.
His breath tore out of his throat and ended in soft, ragged gasps that seemed three times louder. Fear ruled until there was nothing else inside him, no reason, no logic, and no truth. Rain beat a hard tattoo on the roof of the abandoned passenger vehicle he'd taken refuge in for the night, washed down the back glass and made visibility through the mud-splattered windows absolutely impossible.
Sweat dotted his upper lip and brow, dampened his palms and glued his shirt to his chest and back. Finally, when he was certain that nothing was going to come out of the dark and attack him, he lay back down on the seat and tried to gather his scattered wits.
Sleep, though, was a long time in returning. As he lay there, he found himself wondering about where his wife, Lori, and their son, Carl were at that moment. Were they thinking about him, did they believe him to be dead, were they out there and waiting for him to come and find them?
He told Morgan that he was sure that his family was out there, that they were alive, and that he was gonna find them "come hell or high water." And when he did find them, he was gonna make damn sure that he never let 'em go again. I'm gonna make it up to them, he thought as he stared through the sunroof. We'll find somewhere safe and start again.
The storm passed a little while later and Rick found himself able to again drift into a light, but troubled doze. He hadn't been asleep long when he swore he heard the soft chuffing of an animal as it prowled outside the car. His gut twisted with a moment's fear, his pulse kicked and his breath came out as tattered rasps as he waited for whatever was outside to make an attack.
He reached for his revolver even as he heard the soft and plaintive whine of what he hoped was an ordinary dog. Even then, Rick knew regular, everyday ole Fido was still more than capable of ripping a man like him to pieces with its bare teeth. Nails clawed at the car door, unnerving him even more than he already was.
He imagined seeing a mangled face appear in the window a second before a snow-white dog that looked more like some type of a hybrid version of a wolfhound than it did an average mutt outta the pound, jumped up to look at him through the rear passenger window.
The dog let out one loud yip and slapped at the door with paws that Rick swore could have doubled as baseball mitts.
"Sh!" he tried, but the dog just continued his whimpering and whining. "Hey, quit it!"
The dog ignored him and continued making his fuss. That dozens of walkers didn't swarm out of the darkness because of the noise amazed Rick. He didn't count his blessings, though. He still had a huge dog to deal with. One who could be seeing him as a tasty midnight snack.
He studied the noisy mutt, figured he looked harmless enough, considering his immense size, but Rick knew full well how looks could be deceiving. Hadn't he learned that when he'd been forced to do the unthinkable to a ten or eleven-year-old girl? Unbidden, the image of that little blonde-haired girl swam across his visual field.
Guilt and disgust clawed at him anew for what he'd been forced to do in order to survive. It was a cold reminder about how his eyes could have led him into making a costly mistake had his training and instincts not kicked in.
He smacked the image away with a curse, focusing again on the dog that had managed to leap up onto the trunk of the car in order to tap at the back glass with one of its mammoth paws. Rick's mouth went dry as he watched every one of the dog's muscles ripple with a lethal grace.
Rick cringed as the trunk let out a plaintive whine at being forced to absorb the dogs immense size. Every tap at the glass caused his belly to quiver with dread. The mutt stared at him with a mixture of curiosity and something that Rick didn't quite think of as doggie intelligence shining in the depths of his chocolate-colored eyes. He let out another yip before he laid down, heaving a long, drawn out sigh as he stared at Rick.
If not for the precariousness of the situation, he might have found it, and the dog, amusing. As it was, every part of him was on edge, his body primed and just waiting for when the other shoe was gonna drop. He had been lucky until now but knew that his luck could run out. And as affable as his annoying guest appeared to be, his pack mates could be anything but friendly.
Or his owner could be one of those cop-hating folks, Rick thought as he kept his eyes fixed upon the dog who was keeping his eyes trained on him. Footsteps coming around the driver's side of the car alerted him to there being someone else outside.
He went as still as a statue, his breath lodging in his throat as his every sense attenuated to the sound of their walk. His finger curled around the trigger of his revolver as he waited. He wanted to be prepared should he hear that all too familiar shuffling gate or that inarticulate moaning.
He half-expected Snow, as he decided to call the dumb mutt, to take off running as soon as whatever was walking around the front of the car got close enough, but the thump-thump-thump of his tail upon the trunk lid told him the stupid dog was gonna stay right where he was.
There was a soft sigh followed by someone saying something he couldn't quite make out over the loud thumping. It sounded like a request for silence but Rick couldn't be certain. Snow let out a high-pitched bark and smacked his tail even harder on the deck lid. The sound echoed like machine gunfire, shattering the relative silence and skimming along Rick's already frayed nerves, unraveling them further.
"Stop that!" he ordered at the same time that he heard a soft voice hiss, "Krypto!"
The dog, Krypto, he now presumed its name was, merely sat up at the sound of that satin-smooth voice and let out a bark that earned him a, "Hush!" from his female companion. The dog, however, refused to heed to her command and set about whining and yipping and pawing at the glass in a more insistent manner.
He thought he heard the woman mutter something about, "super mutts," followed by something about them not, "comprehending the need to be quiet in an apocalypse," before something heavy got dropped on the hood of the car.
He peeked over the top of the driver's seat, gun at the ready, but couldn't make out any discernible features through the gore-and-mud splattered glass. All he could make out was a small, dark silhouette, nothing else. It could be a woman, a pre-adolescent youth, or even a feminine-sounding man, he reasoned with a sigh.
Krypto — and wasn't that the name of the dog in the Superman comics? he found himself wondering as the dog let out a loud woof and stomped one mammoth foot that shook the vehicle.
"Krypto," he heard the woman huff in that way of a woman who officially reached the end of her tether and was about to blister the hide of whoever was in her path. "I swear I am gonna shoot you in the ass one of these days."
The dog replied with a roll of his eyes and a pointed woof that Rick interpreted as his way of saying, "Right."
He felt a grin tug at his lips despite the precariousness of his situation. Krypto let out another long series of varying sounds: yips, woofs, rolling growls. All of them clearly sought to get his owner to come and see what it was that he'd found.
Rick considered shooting the Wolfhound from Hell himself at that point.
A second shadow darkened the back glass for a moment, alerting him to how yet another person, or persons, was out there. He angled his body so that he could keep a watch on the front and back of the car, his revolver at the ready for whenever someone would either test the doors or bust the glass in order to gain admittance to the car.
It was a tight squeeze, considering the rather limited amount of space he had to work with, and he paid for it when he felt his still-healing skin split and start to throb like a bad tooth. He stifled a curse as he clapped a hand to the wound, but he could already feel the warm stickiness that was already soaking through his shirt. Krypto must have caught the scent of fresh blood because he renewed his yipping and howling with renewed vigor.
"Quiet!" he growled at him to no avail. "Damn dog…"
"What is it, boy?" he heard another voice, this one belonging to what sounded like a teenage boy, ask. The huge dog continued his whining and stomping on the glass with his front feet. "You find something?" A hand, tanned golden brown from long hours spent out in the sun, reached up to rub over the dogs quivering hindquarters. "Is that it?"
More whining greeted the kid's questions. Rick, again, considered shooting the dopey mutt but figured doing so would only make what was already a bad situation worse than it already was. The hand that had been stroking Krypto's flesh wiped at the glass before a boy, all of maybe eleven or twelve, peeked in.
He's the same age as Carl, was the only thought that ripped through Rick's head. For a second, he imagined that it was his son looking in at him. He shook that image away as a new and even more terrifying thought flashed through his mind: this could be what Carl is doing at this very moment.
A newfound horror engulfed him as he thought about his son being out on some dark and deserted road, scavenging for food and water instead of being either safe at Lori's parents' house or the Refugee Center that had been set-up when the crisis began.
His son could even now be running from one of those infected things, at the mercy of whatever Good Samaritan might happen along to save him since his own father wasn't there to keep either him or his mother from harm.
Where is your father, kid? he asked as he stared into eyes that were as green as Carl's. Who is protecting you? Who is keeping you safe?
Who was telling him that it was all gonna be okay?
He went to sit up, but a white-hot pain streaking across his chest caused him to fall back upon the seat with a curse. The boy's eyes popped wide when he finally realized how he was alive and not some near dead or fully dead person.
"Mom!" The boy shouted, rather needlessly in Rick's opinion. A loud whisper could be heard for miles. "Mom! There's an injured man over here!" He clambered up onto the trunk, which groaned even louder this time with the abuse it was being given, and waved his arms in a frantic attempt to get his mother's attention. "Mom! Come quick! There's an injured man in this car here!"
Krypto added to the ruckus by barking.
Rick started to see his life, again, flash before his eyes. I manage to survive getting shot and being in a coma only to get myself killed out on some deserted highway because some kid and his idiotic dog can't grasp the importance of doing everything as silently as possible given the very real threat lurking in the damned dark…
A/N: Hello, all, and welcome!
This is a crossover between Walking Dead, Batman, Flash and some elements of Arrow (both TV). Storylines that happened in season 3 and later on Arrow won't happen in this story. I'm working loosely with elements from season 2 of Flash but twisting them.
Timeline note: I have a TWD fact card that says the outbreak started in Los Angeles around August 7, 2010, so I am loosely timing things around this date. I am also playing with time a bit because there were areas of season one that felt really rushed in my mind. So, if the timeline isn't exactly on point, bear with me, please? :)
Please, if you like this story, follow/fav! Also, feel free to comment below if you liked this story (or not). Happy reading!