Gabriel had been thrown into the Defense Force to be reforged from the ground up. Terminus had been dealt with completely, and Georgia shouldn't pose any major problems for the time being.
Now Calista needed to catch up on the routine reports that had piled up over the past several days.
She'd heard that Eugene had managed to cobble together something useful in the communications department and had recently been brought over to Rock Fortress to work on it with Danny...
Calista pulled Eugene's report from the stack and began flipping through it with interest.
She hadn't even finished when another urgent transmission came in from the prison.
Her heart tightened.
Still holding the report, she quickly made her way to the communications room. The moment she put on the headset, Rick's tense voice came through.
"Holy shit! Calista, listen to me! Greg! Greg was the leader of Terminus! He wasn't a survivor. He was one of the butchers, the leader of those cannibals! He's right there at..."
"Rick," Calista interrupted, immediately relaxing. "Calm down. Greg's already dead."
"What?"
Rick went silent.
"I said Greg and that madman who was with him are both dead," Calista repeated.
"On the way to Rock Fortress, they tried to escape and took Father Gabriel hostage. Zhou's squad shot them both. Gabriel's fine. When he gets the chance, he can tell you what happened himself."
She paused to give Rick a moment to process that, then added, "It happened yesterday. Zhou and the others will fill you in once they get back."
Silence.
Calista could practically imagine Rick's expression. He had probably gone from panic to sudden relief so quickly that his mind had simply stopped working.
At last, Rick let out a long breath.
"Oh... they're dead. They're dead. Good..."
He repeated it under his breath, still shaken.
"Zhou and the others dealt with them on the road? And Gabriel finally stopped being stubborn about it?"
"Of course he did," Calista replied. "He nearly had his throat cut. That shook him pretty badly. But Rick, how did you suddenly find out about Greg?"
Rick seemed to fully recover only then.
He gathered his thoughts before answering.
"From someone we didn't expect. Remember the hunters from Zhou's report? The group that followed the Terminus signs?"
"I remember. Weren't they all wiped out?"
"No. One of them survived. Their leader, Joe."
Rick began explaining.
"He showed up outside the prison gates this morning like a ghost. He was in terrible shape, but he was alive. After we gave him some basic treatment, he told us what happened."
Calista frowned slightly.
Joe?
The leader of the hunters Daryl encountered in the original storyline?
The man whose throat Rick had bitten out?
He had actually survived Terminus?
"What did he say?" Calista asked.
"He's in bad condition. Dehydrated, starving, injured. But he's lucid and extremely alert. Vicious, even," Rick said.
"We gave him some water and food and treated his injuries. Then he told us there were six of them when they reached Terminus. They were 'welcomed' when they arrived. There was a woman at the entrance grilling meat who gave them food and water."
Rick paused.
"Both were drugged. They all passed out. Joe said when he woke up, he was tied down with butcher knives and hooks all around him. Two men in bloodstained aprons were getting ready to bleed him."
Rick continued.
"Joe said he fought like hell. He headbutted one of them hard enough to knock him over, kicked the other one away, broke free of the restraints, and ran out of the slaughter room.
"The place was in chaos. Apparently, the people at Terminus hadn't expected one of their victims to put up that much of a fight. Before Joe escaped into the woods, he even managed to recover his machete. He intended to come back and take revenge on Terminus."
Rick went on recounting Joe's story.
"Joe hid nearby. He saw our people attack Terminus and wipe the place out."
"He watched the whole operation?" Calista asked.
"Most of it. And he saw us take Greg with us."
Rick's breathing grew slightly heavier.
"At the time, Joe didn't know whether we were friends or enemies, so he didn't dare show himself. He waited until we'd completely left, then followed our trail."
"And that led him to the prison?"
"Yeah. He said it took him five days on foot."
Five days.
On foot, wounded, traveling from Terminus to the prison.
Joe really was no ordinary survivor.
"What does he want?" Calista asked calmly.
A man like Joe had his own ruthless philosophy of survival. He wasn't the type to offer valuable information for nothing.
"He said he has nowhere else to go. His entire group is dead. He saw what we're capable of and thinks... maybe there's something to discuss."
Calista was silent for a moment.
"House him for now. Give him the basics, but keep him away from any core areas."
"Understood."
Rick then remembered something else.
"Also, Boone, Sasha, and Tyreese are ready to escort Noah, the boy from the hospital, back to Virginia. They're waiting for your order to leave. Anything else you want them to know?"
Calista tapped a finger against the desk, flipped through a few more pages of Eugene's report, and smiled.
"Yes. Tell them to hold off for now. Their current communications equipment doesn't have enough range to maintain contact all the way between Virginia and the prison, does it?"
Rick hesitated.
"Uh... no, it doesn't. We checked the map. The vehicle radios and walkie-talkies will probably lose contact somewhere around halfway. Since you're asking, do you have something better?"
"Someone here has been working on improving the equipment. I'll take a look at it shortly. If it works, I'll have Zhou and the others bring some back with them. No point sending Boone's group that far out without communications."
"That'd be great."
"There's something else. If they encounter suitable survivors or survivor camps along the way, they should try to recruit them.
"And now that Terminus is gone, there shouldn't be much organized raider activity around the prison. I want you to expand your search radius and start looking for more suitable survivors.
"The Terminus road signs managed to draw in plenty of people, so clearly the method works. Put up some signs of your own. Don't have them point directly toward the prison. Direct people toward a nearby town instead, then observe and screen them before making contact."
"You're planning to expand the base again?"
"Yes. We recently absorbed a group operating on the water. They told us about several survivor camps on land in Tennessee, so I've already sent people to make contact.
"We're closing in on two thousand people now, but that's still nowhere near enough if we want to move into Knoxville."
Calista rubbed the bridge of her nose in frustration.
In the apocalypse, people were resources.
Negan had been absolutely right about that.
Before the apocalypse, Knoxville itself had been a medium-sized city with roughly two hundred thousand residents. And that wasn't even counting the surrounding towns, villages, and suburbs. The greater metropolitan area had contained around eight hundred thousand people.
People, people, people.
Where the hell was she supposed to find that many?
Without enough people, even clearing every walker out of the area wouldn't matter. She still wouldn't have enough manpower to populate the kind of settlement she envisioned.
Rick let out a quiet "Wow," then immediately began preparing to put her instructions into action.
By now, he'd grown much more accustomed to hearing numbers and plans like these.
...
Eugene sat at a workbench buried beneath tangled wires, dismantled radio modules, and sheets of paper covered in hastily scribbled formulas.
A pair of headphones sat over his ears, their foam padding already cracked with age.
His brow was tightly furrowed as he adjusted a handmade communications device with painstaking care.
Ever since being assigned to the communications department to make up for what he'd done, Eugene hadn't had an easy time of it.
He still occasionally crossed paths with Abraham and Rosita.
Although both of them had forgiven him, Eugene himself had never truly gotten past the enormous lie he'd told them about Washington being able to solve everything.
He had lost the strange position he'd once occupied within their small group, where he was both needed and protected.
Now he was simply an awkwardly placed technician on rotation, keeping his head down and working.
Danny didn't exactly trust him.
After evaluating Eugene's abilities, he'd simply handed him the most difficult and tedious jobs in the department. Hardware maintenance and spectrum monitoring.
But Eugene had his own way of making amends.
His intelligence was real.
His head genuinely was packed with knowledge.
And after spending enough time studying the system, Eugene discovered that Rock Fortress's communications network had one fatal flaw.
...
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