Chapter 28:
Lee stopped running after three seconds, at the green gate, panting, eyes wide as he and everyone watched the RV disappear around the bend in the road. The dust it kicked up hung in the air for a moment, and then settled, and then there was nothing left of Kenny's passing except the tire marks in the soft dirt of the farm drive and the silence that came after.
Nobody said anything.
Clark stood where he was, arms at his sides, the blood drying on his forearms and the front of his shirt going from bright to dark in the afternoon air. He watched the road where the RV had been, his face still. He should have felt something at the betrayal of one of the people that he was starting to get close. But other than a sting in his chest, there was nothing else. He noticed that about himself, and the realization of this made him wonder if he had finally snapped.
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
|Dead Weight — You buried the part of yourself that couldn't afford to survive.|
He filed it away. Later.
"He took everything." Carley's voice came out flat. She was standing beside Lee, and her eyes were still on the road, disbelief all over her face. "The water. The food. The medical supplies. The clothes. He took all of it."
"He took everything," Carley said again, quieter this time.
"He panicked." Lee interrupted, hurriedly coming back to him with a calming voice. "He just panicked, he's going to come back. He's probably just driving around the place-"
"Cut the shit." Lilly's voice cut clean across everything Lee was building. She didn't look at any of them. Her eyes, filled with fury, were on the gate, her rifle at her shoulder, her hand tightened against her father's hold, enough that Larry had to hide a wince.
"He knew what he was doing." Lilly continued, face twisted in an ugly scowl and a glare that could kill. "I hope he fucking dies."
"Lilly-" Lee tried.
"What, Lee?!" She turned on him, and the fury in her face wasn't the cold, contained kind she usually carried. "What the fuck else should I wish him?! Safety?! Peace?!" She shook her head, sharp and ugly. "He took our shit. He took it and left us to die. That's what he did."
That silenced them all, a cold fire burning in everyone at the sharp betrayal.
"We have the farm," Mark tried. He said it carefully, the tone of a man wanting to offer a solution to a problem that could give them a better chance to survive another day.
Clark finally moved to destroy the brains of the reanimated heads, eyes cold, the brightness that Clementine loved, gone.
"We have a farm with three dead bodies in the yard and no idea how many more of them are in the area," Lilly shot back. "We have a farm that was supplying human meat to whatever Terminus is, which means Terminus knows this place exists and knows how to find it." She looked at Mark directly. "We have nothing."
Mark closed his mouth.
"We have supplies inside," Carley finally said, doing her own job after seeing the hurt on Lee's face. The pain he must be feeling for being betrayed by a friend. Carley put aside her personal feelings and looked at things logically, because no one else was doing it. Larry was in pain and could do nothing. Heck, he was struggling to breathe properly, and Carley could see how terrified Lilly was of facing it. So, she was snapping at everyone else. That meant the leader of the group couldn't think logically. And neither could Lee. Mark was feeling lost, even though he was trying. He looked to Clementine and saw her eyes fixed on the posture of Clark.
The boy- no… The man was looking at the farm with eyes that were taking all of it in one last time, with new eyes, and Carley could only see pain and grief in them. None of them could do it, so she would for them, just this instant. Her goal wasn't to argue with Lilly, so she kept her voice flat and shut down her own feelings of betrayal from a friend.
"The kitchen, the pantry, their rooms. We take everything they have, except for meat." She paused. "We check the barn for tools. Anything that we can use-"
TRA-TRA-TRA
The gunshots echoed throughout the entire farm, with everyone ducking instinctively, except for Clark, who was watching the road that still had the RV's tire marks, his back to all of them. His arms were at his sides. He hadn't moved. He wasn't looking at the road anymore, or if he was, his eyes were focused on something that wasn't the road.
"Clark." She said his name at a volume and with a tone that was only for him.
He turned.
His face was what it had been since he'd stepped in front of Andrew. Still. It wasn't the stillness of someone who had processed everything and come out the other side. It was the stillness of someone who had made a decision about what kind of person they were going to be in this new world and hadn't yet had time to grieve the person they used to be.
Clementine looked at him for a long moment.
He looked back.
"Where's Ben?" he asked.
The question landed in the middle of the worried group; their minds shifted from the gunshots to Ben. Lee's expression shifted. Carley's did too. Lilly's rifle hand came down slightly.
"What?" Lee asked.
"Ben." Clark looked around the yard, at the farmhouse door, at the barn, at the fence line. "Where is he?"
Nobody answered immediately. Lilly's eyes moved across the yard, the same automatic sweep she'd been doing since they'd arrived, and came back with nothing. Lee turned and looked toward the farmhouse, then the barn, and then the road.
"He was with us when we arrived," Mark said, frowning.
"He said he needed the bathroom." Carley's voice had gone careful now. "When Brenda brought everyone inside. He said he needed the bathroom and he'd be right in."
The quiet that followed was a different shape than the one before.
"That was before-" Lee stopped. "That was before everything."
Clark looked at the tire marks in the dirt. "He's in the RV," Clark said.
The quiet shifted again.
"He wouldn't-" Lee started and stopped again. Because the sentence didn't have a good ending. He wouldn't what? He wouldn't climb into an RV to hide because he was scared? Ben had been scared every day since Lee had known him. Ben had been scared of Larry, of walkers, of the fence line, of being asked to contribute. Ben, who had never quite found where he belonged in the group and had stopped expecting to.
Ben, who had watched Clark execute three people in the space of two minutes.
"He's in the RV," Clark said again. Quieter this time.
"Everyone, get inside," Clark ordered, finally turning to meet them all face to face as his sound mind and instincts warned of the gunshots that had echoed.
At the same time, it was time to see what his silver, now turned advantage, would give him after he got a 17 on the D20-
[Golem Creation]
|Elite Ability|
Allows you to animate and command golems from earth, mud, sand or metal, the more durable and powerful the golem the higher the cost. The golems can be made temporary with less energy cost or permanent with a very high energy cost.
OR
[The Real Weapon]
|Rare Trait|
There is only one weapon you truly own. And they are your very fists. Your physical stats get augmented proportionally to the strongest weapon you own. But the increase in physical stats is negated the moment you wield a weapon of any kind.
The options seemed to be a test if Clark had any opinion about it. Would he choose power for himself, to make it easier to slaughter his enemies, or would he choose safety for the group as a whole?
And Clark almost wanted to snort at it mockingly. If this truly was a test from his lottery power, then it was an easy one-
[Golem Creation]
|Elite Ability|
Allows you to animate and command golems from earth, mud, sand, or metal. The more durable and powerful the golem, the higher the cost. The golems can be made temporary with less energy cost or permanent with a very high energy cost.
A moment later, four figures, their skin resembling the earth and gravel that was around them, crawled their way to the surface, making the group tense and back up.
The energy cost was there, making him feel as if he had run for an hour straight, which made him wonder how costly it would be if he summoned them permanently.
The four golems stood in the farmyard with the stillness of things that had been given shape but not yet purpose, which Clark would fix right away, to protect everyone else in this group, but their priority would always be on Clementine first.
Their surfaces the color of the farm's gravel and earth, the seams where Clark had pulled them together still visible if you knew to look. They were roughly human in outline- if humans were eight feet tall, built like a fusion of bodybuilder and earth. The details weren't there- no faces, no fingers, just mass and purpose now.
"Clark, what's going on?" Carley asked, seeing that others, including Clementine, looked in wonder and a little bit of fear at the four giants.
He looked at the group. "They'll patrol the perimeter. If something comes through the fence, they'll slow it down long enough for you to know about it at the very least." He looked at each of them in turn. "Get inside. Take what we need from the kitchen and the pantry. Clothes, medicine, and tools from the barn if Mark can check them. Leave the meat."
He walked up to Larry, crouching next to him and watching the old man with a blank look.
"What do you want, punk?" Larry asked with fake anger but real pain. He switched Sharpen with Purification, placing his hand on Larry's shoulder, and then getting hit with another dose of fatigue, but pushed past it.
"How do you feel?" Clark asked.
"Get your hands off me, you brat. You think I need your help?" The prideful man took his hand off him- "Dad!" Lilly- and others- understood what had just happened, including Larry himself. But the man in pain scoffed.
"What?" He shot back with a glare, "You think he can fix me with a touch?! Stop fussing and mind your own business! I'm fine! It'll pass. It always passes." He grunted, feeling another wave of pain due to getting agitated.
But it brought down his walls enough for everyone to see the real man behind the mask, a man who was scared but knew he was a dead weight to them all. "This is nothing…" His previous spunk seemed to be dying. "It's just an old man's heart doing what old men's hearts do." He covered Lilly's hand with his, briefly, and then patted it once. "Go do what needs doing."
"I'll go and search the forest around the farm to make sure there isn't a horde coming towards us." Clark briefly smiled at Larry before standing up, telling everyone of his plan.
"Clark-" Lee started.
"You're injured, Lee." He told him with finality. "I got this." Clark tried to reassure them and watched as they stiffly nodded, going back inside. Then Clementine broke from them, walking up and hugging him, ignoring that the blood on his clothes, even if a little dried, dirtied hers.
"I love you, Clark." She whispered, and Clark hugged her back, relaxing just a little in her arms.
"I love-"
"So please, don't kill the man I love." She continued, with a pause. "Don't become a monster. Don't convince yourself that that's what you have to become to protect us. Please." She begged, her hold tightening just a little bit.
"Do what you have to. But stay my Clark Rogers. Come home to me."
His hold on her tightened just a little, taking in her scent and warmth, nodding. "I will." He promised, the darkness in his heart and eyes lightened just a little. "Now, go." He freed himself from her arms, and a kiss landed on her forehead.
"Go." He repeated, his enhanced hearing from Half Light and Superhuman, picking up engine sounds. The golems also moved, hiding themselves behind the farmhouse.
By the time she went inside, Clark had turned around, marching towards the green gate, ready to greet the guest with blood.
…
…
…
The RV's engine was the loudest thing in the world when Kenny needed it to be quiet and the quietest thing when he needed it to be loud, and right now, with the farm disappearing in the side mirror, it was doing neither. It was just running, the way it always ran, the way it had run across half of Georgia with the same complaints and the same loose rattle somewhere in the dashboard that he'd never gotten around to fixing.
Duck was in the back.
Kenny knew that without looking, because he could feel Katjaa's silent cries and sobs as she comforted her nine-year-old child.
He didn't look at her face because he knew what he would find, and he didn't have the room nor the strength for it right now. He needed both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road, and whatever was left of him on the decision he'd just made.
It had been a decision.
It had been a stupid and idiotic thing to do logically. The group that he left behind- no. The group that he betrayed, while it had its faults, had also safety in numbers. And if that wasn't enough, it had Clark Rogers.
A kid who had abilities that would pop out of thin air and provide for everyone. He could provide food and shelter for them all and much, much more.
Which made him wonder where this decision came from-
Then he remembered the look on that boy- no, on that monster's eyes. The dark and blank face that had purposefully left Duck kept staring at a decapitated head for who knows how long, while he went to question the other monster that had invited them to their farm.
The logical part of him knew his reasoning was foolish, but he couldn't let Duck close to that thing that was wearing human skin.
Humans didn't sprout powers one after another. They couldn't turn into a cat and then back into a human. They couldn't heal from life-threatening injuries in a matter of days, nor could they survive an explosion that could rag doll them across two dozen meters.
It just didn't make sense.
At first, he had put on a mask of understanding and hope that everything would make sense after a while, or he'd come to get used to all of it. He tried his best to see that…- Thing as a kid, a eighteen years old kid that had survived by the skin of his teeth out there alone for months. And it worked for a moment, during the travel to St-John's farm. But he couldn't continue after seeing the massacre. The way those people at the farm were killed and had made Duck watch!
That was the part that made his rage inside burn.
He had made his nine-year-old son watch as he tore into those people. That thing didn't cover his eyes or make his son turn away from the massacre. No, he purposely showered a nine-year-old in blood and made him watch how he tore into others.
The memory of it made him rage more and more.
Who the fuck was he to do that to his son?! He screamed inwardly. He had no right!
"Kenny."
Katjaa's voice. He didn't answer.
"Kenny, look at me."
He didn't, his eyes glaring at the road in front of him, hoping that he would never see that monster.
The RV hit a rut and shuddered, and from the back, the other passenger in their RV shifted. A small sound. Not Duck. Duck still wasn't making sounds. No, the one to make the sound was the tall kid who had a crush on Clementine, who loved a monster.
Poor girl. He pitied her, but shook his head. He instead focused on the extra.
Ben Paul was sitting in the seat behind Katjaa.
His knees were drawn up slightly. His arms were wrapped around himself. His eyes, when Kenny found them in the mirror, were avoiding him or pretending it hadn't happened.
Kenny stared at him in the mirror for a minute, almost growling.
He intended to kick him out the minute he saw Ben hiding in the RV after seeing Clark killing those farm people.
"I-" Ben's jaw worked. "I couldn't go back out there. After what he-" He stopped again, repeating the same thing over and over every time their eyes met in the mirror.
"Where are we going?" Ben asked.
"Savannah," Kenny said.
The word sat in the vehicle.
"We should go back," Katjaa said it quietly, which was the only way she ever said the things she'd already decided. "We left them without supplies. Without-" Duck whimpered- the only sound he made since they left the farm- at the thought of going back, clutching tightly into Katjaa's hug.
"We left them with that thing with a name!" Kenny snapped protectively.
"Kenny-"
"He's got abilities, Katjaa." He kept his eyes on the road. "He's got that horn thing. He can feed them. He can protect them. He didn't need what was in the back, and neither did anyone else there." He paused, the logic sounding right as he said it, and feeling wrong in a way things felt wrong when you were using them to justify something you'd already done. "We're the ones who need it." He wasn't sure who he was telling that to. Katjaa or himself.
"That's not-"
"We have a boat," he said. "We have a plan. We've had a plan since day one. We go to the boat, we get out on the water, and we keep Duck safe. That's the plan. That's always been the plan."
Katjaa was quiet.
Duck was finally crying, which made his mother wrap her arm around him more fiercely, finally nodding to Kenny.
"Okay."
The road was quiet after that.
Then the radio crackled.
It came from the back, from the barn radio he'd grabbed off the bloody shelf when he'd gone through the barn to get Duck from Andrew.
He'd put it on the shelf behind the driver's seat and forgotten about it in the urgency of everything after. Now it crackled again, and a voice came through the static, and Kenny's hands didn't move on the wheel, but his jaw did.
"-Andrew, come in. Andrew, what's your status? The boss is getting impatient. Your little project is taking too long."
Static.
"Andrew. Dan. One of you answer this radio right now, or we're sending the extraction team without your blessing. We've got a horde heading toward your position with a screacher, and the boss wants the farm cleared before it arrives. If you've got live ones down there, get them contained. If you don't-"
More static for another two minutes.
"-Fuck this, we're sending the extraction team and let them handle cleanup. Either way, we're twenty minutes out."
Kenny's eyes went to the mirror. Ben was staring at the radio with an expression that had gone white around the edges.
"That's Terminus," Ben said. His voice was barely audible. "They're talking about the farm. They're going to-"
"I know what they're talking about," Kenny said.
Katjaa had turned in her seat, her hand no longer on the dash. "We have to go back."
"We-"
"Kenny." Her voice, her tone changed into what he thought was a command. She was not asking and not suggesting, and the conversation was over. "There are people at that farm. There is Lee at that farm. There is Carley at that farm, and she's pregnant! There is a young girl, an old man, and Lilly-" She stopped. "Even Clark-"
"Clark can handle-"
"We don't know that!" She shot back, silencing Duck's whimpers. "We don't know if he can protect everyone else. Or if he truly even cares about it! Carley- she's pregnant with Lee's child!" She begged, trying to make her husband see past his justified fears for her and Duck. "They need to know-"
"No!" Ben interrupted, shouting firmly, letting go of the restraints he had for so long after seeing Kenny's face twitch and scowl and finally see past everything. That while he was terrified of Clark and what he could do, the others still needed to know what was going on, and that a group was heading their way to kill them all.
As soon as Kenny had swallowed and the RV slowed, Ben interrupted Katjaa, eyes wide in panic and fear and terror at what he'd seen while he was hiding in the RV.
"At the farm." Ben's voice was shaking slightly, but he kept going, the words coming out with the particular momentum of someone who had been sitting on them for the last twenty minutes and had finally found a space where they might land. "He just- he didn't hesitate. He cut off a man's hand and then his head. He killed all three of them in less than a minute. Without-" He stopped, his body trembling.
"Without feeling anything." Ben's jaw was tight. "His face didn't change. He just- he looked at Andrew the same way others look at walkers. Like they were things to be dealt with."
The radio crackled again. Static. Then silence.
"He'll kill them when he's done with them," Ben said. "That's what people like that do. I've seen it. The groups that survive, the ones that are actually dangerous out there-" He shook his head at the nightmares that he was having. First Save-Lots bandits, now Clark. "They don't keep liabilities. They keep tools. And when the tool stops being useful-"
"Clark is not like that," Katjaa said, but her voice had less certainty than it should have.
"He killed three people in a farmyard," Ben reminded her. "In front of your nine-year-old." Duck trembled and cried out, which hardened Kenny's expression back to stone-like.
The silence that followed was the longest one yet.
Kenny's hands were on the wheel. The road was still the road. The RV was still the RV. The locked room in his chest was doing something he didn't have a word for.
"We keep going," Kenny said.
"Kenny-"
"We keep going."
"Kenny." Katjaa tried, her attempt weak, but her husband shook his head. "Ben is right…" He told her, shooting a glance towards her and their son, before watching the clear road. "If we go back, they might take everything."
"They will!" Ben added, nodding frantically, finally having someone on his corner after months of isolation. "The best case scenario, they just leave us be. Worst case, Clark-" Duck was openly crying now at the name, finally getting over his shock- "he might kill us all."
The RV drove on for another few minutes when the first shots came.
Not single shots. Automatic fire, the kind that came from weapons with magazines and no patience, the kind that didn't distinguish between a windshield and a wall, and the RV's windshield was already cracking before Kenny had finished processing the sound.
"GET DOWN-"
He yanked the wheel. The RV swerved, the back end swinging out across the road, and the shots followed them, tracking.
The windshield gave.
The tire gave a half second after, the front right going with a sound like a gunshot of its own, and then the vehicle was on momentum alone, and the tree line was very close, and Kenny had just enough time to think that the road curved here and he hadn't seen the curve and hadn't-
The tree arrived at approximately forty miles per hour.
The front right corner of the RV found the oak's trunk and crumbled in on itself. Metal, wood, glass, and the high, short scream of a tire that popped off, and then the world tilted and stopped.
Kenny's head found the steering wheel, the bag not popping off.
It wasn't hard enough to kill him. But it was hard enough that the world went white in pain and then sideways in a way that had nothing to do with the RV's angle, and the dashboard swam, and the windshield or what was left of it. He could feel a warm liquid on exiting from the point of impact, but Kenny didn't care about it.
He didn't care about himself, trying his best to look back at his family.
He heard something. He thought he heard something. Katjaa's voice, maybe. Or Duck's. He couldn't separate them. His ears or head- Kenny wasn't sure- were ringing and hurting like a bitch.
He tried to turn his head.
The world lurched sideways when he did, and he gripped the wheel because it was the closest thing to him that he could hold on to.
Katjaa. Duck.
The thought arrived before the rest of him had caught up with anything. He turned anyway, slow, the world still doing its sideways thing, and found her.
She was on the floor of the RV between the seats and the dash, her body curled around Duck the way she'd thrown herself in the half second before impact, both arms around him, her back facing toward the windshield. Duck was against her, his head- bloody once more- tucked against her chest, unconscious. His forehead had found something during the crash, the edge of the seat, the console, Kenny couldn't tell, and there was blood there, dark at the hairline, running into his son's closed eyes.
Duck's chest was moving, but barely.
Kenny noticed that first, before anything else, before the blood, before Katjaa's stillness, before the two dark stains spreading through the back of her shirt that hadn't been there before the shots.
Two of them. High on the back, below the left shoulder, and the other lower, toward the side. She hadn't made a sound since the crash. She was still curled around Duck, her grip on him hadn't loosened, but she wasn't moving on her own anymore.
"Katjaa." His voice came out wrong. Thick. "Katjaa, hey. Hey, look at me."
She didn't look at him.
Her face was turned toward Duck's hair, her cheek resting against the top of his head, and her eyes were open but not focused on anything he could find. Her breathing was there. He could see it, shallow and too fast, the rhythm of a body that was working very hard at something it was losing ground on.
"Katjaa." Her eyes moved. They found him and teared in fear and worry and pain-
"Duck," she said. One word. Not a question.
"He's okay," Kenny said, because that was the only answer he had and the only one that mattered to her. "He's okay. He's breathing. He's right here."
Her hand, the one that had been around Duck's shoulder, moved. It found Duck's hair and stayed there, her fingers loose now, the grip not what it had been. But her hand stayed.
Her eyes stayed on Kenny's.
"You have to-" she started.
"Don't," he said. "Don't do that. We're going to-" There were footsteps walking towards them that they hadn't noticed in the chaos.
"You have to keep going," she said. The words came out clear in a way that cost her something. "The boat.."
"Katjaa-"
"Damn, you're noisy-" Kenny turned, only seeing a figure of a man that had a gun with a silencer aimed at him. "Wai-" then there was a silenced shot, Kenny's head shotting back and then falling on top of the wheel.
Katjaa could only cry silently, bleeding out, her vision darkening. The last sight she saw was that of her husband getting shot in the head, his cap falling to the floor, dead.
The footsteps moved through the RV with the efficiency of people conducting an inventory.
They didn't speak much. The occasional word, a direction, a count. The sound of cabinets opening and closing, containers being moved, the clink of supplies being assessed and either taken or dismissed. They moved like people who had done this before and expected to do it again and had long since stopped finding it remarkable.
"Good haul," someone said. A male voice, flat and satisfied. "Better than the last two."
"Check the back."
More footsteps. A pause.
"Got one," the second voice said. Different register. Still flat. "Teenager. Male. Took one in the arm, but he's breathing."
"Shot him in the head and get it over with."
"Wait! Please!" The muffled voice came from inside, and the leader of the squad sighed, entering the RV to finish the job, only to pause at hearing the desperate pleas of a dead weight mentioning a farm that sounded very familiar to what they had been fighting against in the war against Terminus for.
The leader was surprised that a group had taken it for themselves, but hearing the dead weight- oops, Ben the hostage, the leader corrected himself, pleaded that he could be used for an exchange, and he was kept alive.
Their attention was then brought to the two bodies on the floor of the RV, a mother and son, hugging each other. The mother had supposedly protected her kid from the shots they fired, but in the end, it was useless. Both seemed to be bleeding out.
"Want me to finish them off?" A woman- the one to fire at the RV first- offered, but the leader shook his head. "Nah, I'm kinda curious to see if one of them survives or becomes food for the dead." He waved, "My bet is on the kid getting eaten alive. Oi, someone write down this location so we can come back a week later!"
…
…
…
Back at the farm, Clark heard the vehicles before he saw them. Two of them, the engine signature of something heavy and armored, moving at a pace that was loud and was getting louder as it got closer to the farm. It either meant people who didn't expect resistance or had decided not to care about it either way.
He was at the green gate when they came around the curve of the farm road.
Two black SUVs that had been military-adjacent before everything ended and had found new owners since. They rolled to a stop, maybe thirty feet from the gate, and then the engine was turned off.
Clark noticed some looks being thrown away, surprised at being greeted by a stranger and not the brothers or even the mother.
Doors opened.
Clark counted. Seven from the first vehicle, five from the second. Twelve that were visible, which meant there were probably more he couldn't see inside the cars.
They fanned out with the practiced movement of people who trained together, covering angles, the tree line, the fence. Two of them had rifles with optics. The rest had weapons that were automatic but smaller than the rifles that the other two were carrying. Clark assumed that they were loaded and held with the ease of people who weren't pointing them at anything yet because they hadn't needed to.
If he wanted to get rid of them, he needed to close the distance. While being shot at didn't do anything to him if it was from small calibers now, from big ones, such as the rifles, it still left bruises all over his body, making his movement stiff.
He could ignore the pain from those, but it didn't mean he wasn't feeling the black and blues all over him right now. Once from protecting Lilly and the second time from Danny shooting at him-
One of them walked forward from the group- breaking Clark from his thoughts- and stopped about ten feet from the gate. He was mid-forties, built like a man who had been in shape before and had stayed in shape after, with the posture of a man who had been doing this long enough that it had stopped being stressful and become routine.
If Lilly or Mark were with him, they'd recognize that it was military.
His eyes went to the bodies in the farmyard. Andrew. Danny. Brenda. The man couldn't see their injuries or how they died. But he recognized their bodies and their decapitated heads.
His expression moved through something brief and settled back into neutral.
"Huh," he said. More to himself than to Clark.
He looked at Clark then. His eyes did a quick assessment, the up-and-down of someone cataloging a threat, trying to find the blade that had separated the heads of his farm folks. His mouth did something that was close to amusement, the very brief expression of a man confronted with something that didn't match his expectations and found the mismatch mildly interesting.
"You do that?" He nodded toward the bodies while his eyes searched the barn, the house, and the yard for any sign of eyes that were watching them. His men covered the tree lines and the roads.
"Yes," Clark said.
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
The man's mouth did the almost-amusement thing again. He glanced back at the group behind him, a brief look that communicated something Clark couldn't fully read, and then back.
"Where's your blade?"
"Gave them to my people." He lied, though he was missing his pipe now. It was in the RV. "I stayed behind to buy them time."
It was so easy to lie when he intended to protect people, Clark realized.
"We're from Terminus," The man said, not believing a single word. His words were said the way people said things that were supposed to mean something. "We had an arrangement with the people here." A pause, his eyes going to the bodies again, briefly. "Past tense, now, I guess."
"I know what your arrangement was," Clark said.
The man looked at him. The almost-amusement was gone. In its place was something more careful, a recalibration almost, the look of someone who had arrived expecting one kind of conversation and was now understanding they were in a different one.
"That's going to be a problem," he said.
"Is it?" Clark asked. "I'm offering a trade. Me."
A beat. The man's hand moved to his holster, not drawing, just resting, and Clark watched it, showing no sign that he feared for his life. "Take me to your place and do what you have to. Leave my people go." Again, Clark lied, hoping that they'd accept it. That way, he wouldn't have to go and find their hideouts.
Though if that happened, that left the problem that the man might leave some people behind- oh wait, Clark remembered the gunshots, meaning that a horde would be coming or passing through the farm, which meant, they might not leave people behind. Instead, they might leave and draw the horde to another place before coming back. By that point, he'd already have-
"Damn." The man in front of him snapped him out of his thoughts. "Never realized that there'd be more ruthless people out there than us." He chuckled good-naturally, as if they were friends. "I mean, really? Letting a kid volunteer while they hide in a hole?"
"I insisted." Clark broke eye contact, watching the farm. "This was the only good thing left in this world. I remember coming here with my parents so often. Now, all of that is ruined." His gaze returned to the man in front of him, watching the brows shift.
"And your parents are fine with this?" He waved his hand towards Clark and everything he was doing.
"They really can't have an opinion about it." Clark shot back. The man paused and then laughed, as if he heard something funny. "Damn, son. You're making me feel bad about this."
"So, how about I show you a little mercy?" The chuckle faded into a smirk, taking out a pistol with a silencer on it. He aimed it directly at Clark's head, dozens of feet away. "Damn, not even a flinch."
"Just do it," Clark told him, changing his plan, openly glaring at the men now.
"Man, I wish I could have met you another way. I'm really starting to like you." His finger moved to the trigger, enjoying this moment more than he should. "But I'll grant you your request. I'll take you and let your group run from wherever they are hidden. I'll do at least that much."
"Thank y-" Before Clark could finish, his head snapped back, his body falling behind and then backhitting the dirt pathway.
He heard the sound the group made. Not a celebration, exactly. The man let out a 'what a shame' and then started to order his men around. He heard footsteps on the farm drive, the crunch of gravel under boots, coming toward the gate.
One set. The nearest man, the one the leader had directed, came to confirm.
Clark waited until the footsteps reached the gate.
The gate latch lifted.
The gate swung inward.
The footsteps crossed from the road onto the farm drive, five feet, four, three, the pace of someone doing a task they'd done before and expected to complete the same way- it paused.
"What the-"
Chaos erupted as Clark activated Stone Skin, grabbing a man's ankles.
The man felt the firm grip before he understood it, his body already responding to the wrongness of the force before his brain had processed what was happening, and then Clark was upright, his skin textured like stone, and the man was horizontal, and the arc of the swing had already begun.
He hit two of the nearest Terminus men at knee height, the sound of bones snapping and screams of men echoed in the area. All three of them went down. The one in Clark's hand stopped moving when Clark swung again at the ground, smashing his head and snapping the neck.
Before anyone could understand what was happening, Clark was already moving.
Double Jump took him off the ground before the nearest rifle had finished tracking him, the second jump off nothing but air carried him over the arc of fire and dropped him into the space between the two riflemen before either could process his feat.
Purification was already switched with Leaf Blade since Sharpen was still on cooldown. Two pure green lights in the shape of a leaf enveloped his hands, extending his range one meter on each hand.
"What the fuck is that!" The man in charge yelled, stumbling back as the brain processed what happened in under ten seconds, staring in fear as the two rifleman dropped their weapons, two green lights in the shape of a leaf coming out of their heads.
The two riflemen dropped before the sound of the leaf blades cutting through them had finished carrying across the farmyard.
The group's reaction arrived in stages, the way shock always did when the brain received information that didn't have a category to file it into. First was the freeze, all of them, twelve remaining, locking up for the half-second that the human nervous system required to catch up with what the eyes had just delivered. Then came the sound that wasn't coordination nor tactical, just the raw, involuntary noise of people whose threat assessment had just been completely destroyed.
"What the-"
"OPEN FIRE-"
Clark was already gone from where they were shooting.
Instead, he was right in their personal space, with every slash of his hand, a body was cut in two. More men exited the car, rifles in hand, and kept firing at his figure, but Clark scowled and winced at the black and blues increasing on his body-
Another jump- which, with SuperHuman, made it appear like a dash, and Clark had torn four others, their screams and pleas nothing but background noise, until twenty total men became six.
He noticed the squad leader run to the second car, pants soiled, turning the engine on and driving away. Which Clark let him- the five others seemed to want to do the same, but a swipe of hand, and five bodies had become ten parts total.
It took Clark maybe five minutes at most to deal with all twenty men. His hands still glowing from the light of the Leaf Blade, active, before he turned it off, panting. He stayed in the middle of the carnage for a moment before heading towards the farmhouse.
He had let the leader escape. For one reason and one reason only.
But first, he had to check up on everyone else in the farmhouse, to make sure they didn't get hit by any stray bullets.
The door opened before he reached it, Clementine in the frame with her eyes doing the fast read they always did, moving over him, checking for injuries in worry. Behind her, Lee had stood up from wherever he'd been sitting, and Carley's hand had gone to the back of the chair she was gripping. Lilly was at the window, rifle at her shoulder, lowering it as he came through the yard. Mark was behind her. Larry was in the corner chair, his hand on his chest, his breathing controlled.
Clark stopped in the yard, a few feet from the door.
"They're gone," he said. "Twenty of them." He looked at the group and then back towards where the second car had driven off.
"Clark-" Lilly started-
"I'll be back tonight."
Nobody said anything immediately.
He continued, "I'm going to find their base." He reached for the hem of his blood-soaked shirt, which had been too small since the Surgical Destruction and had become more so over the course of the afternoon, and pulled it over his head. The fabric came away stained dark in several places, the evidence of the afternoon written across it. He dropped it on the gravel.
"I'll be back before midnight…"
Clementine stepped forward from the doorway.
He looked at her. She stopped.
"I'll be back," he said again, quieter. Just to her.
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she nodded, once, the tight nod of someone who had already had this argument with themselves and lost.
The change started with his height and then his forearms.
Lilly saw it first, her eyes dropping to his arms as the dark fur pushed through the skin at the forearms, and shins simultaneously, the same black as the cat form, spreading upward. His jaw shifted, the bones of it moving under the skin with a sound that was felt more than heard, the angle of it lengthening slightly, the brow ridge coming forward.
"Clark-" Lee's voice.
His spine elongated. The pants, which had already been straining at the seams, gave up along the outer thighs with two clean tears as his frame finished the expansion, settling into the hybrid's proportions. The fur had reached his shoulders. His eyes had shifted, the emerald darkening and the pupil narrowing to a slit.
He was still recognizably him.
But now, he was growing, until he stopped at about ten feet; the only thing covering his modesty was a destroyed pair of pants, which made Clementine gulp. The others felt their instincts warn them to get down or run. His tail swept once behind him, slow and deliberate.
"I'll be back." Clark's voice was strange, deeper, and almost a rumble as it traveled to their ears. He looked at them one last time, giving them a nod, and then he moved.
The first stride covered the distance from the farmhouse to the fence in a way that compressed space rather than crossing it. Superhuman and the hybrid's muscle mass combined into something that had no comfortable frame of reference for the humans watching from the doorway. By the second stride, he had cleared the fence. By the third, the tree line had taken him.
The farm went quiet.
In the doorway, no one spoke for a moment.
Then Larry's voice, from the corner chair, dry and worn and carrying something underneath it broke the silence. "Well," he said. "At least he's on our side."
Outside, for the first time in a long time, they realized the forest had quietened down. Even the insects didn't let out their songs.
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AN: Yooooooo- WTF it's 2 AM ALREADY?!
Okay, gotta keep it short cause I gotta go and sleep.
Hope you enjoyed the chapter. Some action. Some pov of Kenny. I feel bad giving him and his family that ending. Ben survived and he's doing his best to survive. even if taken by a nightmare group that he tries his best to stay away from, i.e save-lots bandits.
Terminus attacked, got rekt, now the leader of the squad that played with Clark is the mouse while being chased by a cat.
Hmm, what else? idk...
Ok that's it. I'm going to sleep. Bye bye.