Don't Get Dead | TWD | Volume 1

[30] Pushing it

I froze.

There were hundreds of them, maybe more. I wanted to look away, but I knew better. This was real; the walkers would not magically disappear. At some point I had been looking for so long that I couldn't see the threat anymore, I was just staring.

Glenn said that he and Daryl heard a shot, which meant that the walkers heard it too. How else would that many find this place? I was a thousand percent sure that the gunshot drew them to the farm. Even if the breaches had been fixed, that many walkers pushing up against the fence would bring it down instantly.

I looked to the others for answers, but they were just as shocked as me, staring out at the onslaught of walkers. We have to go, we have to go, we have to go. The fear taking over my mind wasn't enough to control my body to move away, as my eyes returned to the herd.

"Patricia, kill the lights," Hershel whispered.

Maggie turned and walked past me, following Patricia as she said: "I'll get the guns."

"Maybe they're just passing," Glenn suggested, "like the herd on the highway. Should we just go inside?"

"Not unless there's a tunnel downstairs I don't know about," Daryl shook his head. "A herd that size would rip the house down."

Great. We couldn't hide from the walkers, which meant we had to run or fight, but not even I was that naive. We didn't have the bullets to kill all of those, so the only option was to leave. But we couldn't. Rick and Shane were still lost in the woods somewhere—

"—Carl's gone."

My head snapped back to look at Lori, standing in the doorway, her eyes wide as she scanned the environment, probably looking around to find Carl. Her chest was rising and falling so rapidly, the panic apparent in her eyes. Panic which had now infiltrated my mind.

How could he be gone?

"What?" Daryl asked.

"He was upstairs," Lori said. "I can't find him anymore."

The last I remembered seeing Carl, he said that he would be upstairs and keep an eye out for Randall, but I hadn't seen him since then. Wouldn't he have seen the herd coming? Why wasn't he up there anymore?

"Maybe he's hiding," Glenn suggested.

"He's supposed to be upstairs," she exclaimed. "I'm not leaving without my boy!"

"We're not," Carol agreed. "We're gonna look again. We're gonna find him."

The two turned and sprinted back into the house just as Maggie came out with the gun bag in her arms. She dropped it on the ground before us, before taking a handgun and shotgun, before giving the latter to Glenn. She left everyone else to get their own weapons from the pack.

"Maggie," Glenn started.

She cocked her gun. "You grow up country, you pick up a thing or two."

"They got the numbers," Daryl said. "It's no use."

Part of me wondered why we were even considering shooting the walkers around the farm. More shooting would only draw more walkers. Even if we managed to kill a few of them, we definitely did not have enough ammo to kill enough of them to matter.

"You can go if you want," Hershel told him, taking a shotgun from the bag.

Daryl stared at him for a second. "You gonna take 'em all on?"

"We have guns; we have cars."

Andrea nodded, kneeling on the ground and rifling through the gun bag. "Kill as many as we can, and we'll use the cars to lead the rest of them off the farm."