Don't Get Dead | TWD | Volume 1

[12] There Are Others

That morning, we moved everything down to the cars. Rick said we should do one last sweep of the nursing home to ensure that we took everything of value. Few items left behind were useful, so we just grabbed what we could.

I helped the group, taking some of the boxes the adults seemed light enough for me to carry. If they only knew the kind of labour I experienced back at my dad's garage, I would have been so much more helpful to the group that way.

When most of the things were packed into the cars, Rick told everyone that they should wait by the caravan so he could bring down the rest of the items. I was going to stay with the group when I remembered that I had left my bag back in the building, so I followed Rick and a few others inside.

My backpack was on the first floor, in the room we slept in upstairs. Shane, Rick and Dale had entered the room behind me, throwing the last few items into some boxes. I kneeled down to pack away my hoodie into the bag before swinging the straps over my shoulders.

I felt safe enough to walk back down to the caravan by myself. Shane and Daryl killed all the stragglers around the nursing home before we walked back to the cars. Rick and the others wouldn't be too far behind, so they would be there to my rescue if anything happened.

"Ace?" T-Dog called as I reached the end of the hallway. "You mind getting Jacqui for me? I just need to take these last few things down."

The mention of her name reminded me that I had not seen Jacqui all night, not since she excused herself to sleep in her own room. I thought someone would have told her we were leaving by now, but that didn't happen.

I simply nodded. "Okay."

Jacqui spent the night in a room at the far end of the hallway, away from where the rest of the group had settled. After everything that had happened over the past few days, she probably just wanted to be alone.

Not that I blamed her.

It was hard for me to be around the group as much as I had, and sometimes I just wanted to disappear. Trying to sleep with everyone sitting around in the same room was one of the worst things I went through, and I only wished I had my own space too.

The first thing I noticed to be weird was that the cloudy windows to Jacqui's room should have been partly transparent. Still, these particular windows had been covered by some newspapers. I glanced around at some of the other doors. I thought Guillermo's people had done this to give everyone some privacy, but I didn't see anything like this throughout the nursing home.

It was only this door.

My hand balled into a fist, and I gently knocked on the door. "Jacqui, we're leaving soon?"

There was no answer.

I waited a moment in silence before calling out again. "Jacqui?"

Nothing.

I grabbed the door handle and twisted it downward, pushing on the door with my other hand, but it wouldn't budge. I knocked again, more frantically this time, but again, there was no reply. I knew Jacqui hadn't left the room, or T-Dog wouldn't have asked me to fetch her. She had to be there.

I kept trying, wondering if it was just stuck, but the door wouldn't open. When pushing turned out to be futile, I slammed my hand down on the glass, calling for Jacqui again and again, but she never came to open the door. There was no way she could still be asleep after all the noise I was making.

There were footsteps at my side, and I saw Shane exiting the room with a box in his arms. He stopped when I called his name. "Shane, Jacqui is in there, and the door won't open."