Re: clem rescue - graham/shane/jack
[It could only be described as a sort of tunnel vision, seared down to a black point, so focused, the wrong glint of sun, and shit would catch the fuck on fire. Shane moved from one type to the next—the first had been the sort that naturally slid down during sex, only to be disrupted, jarred loose by Clem's relocation. Now, the nucleus of his attention shifted to the kind handy in emergencies, the kind that gave you a touch of distance, slowed time a second or two. He was disheveled, hair unruly, with sweat clear on his face under the grim, skeletal sun, and his heart wasn't racing from fear or from the shambling drag and thump of reanimated predator.
Shane moved with Graham, crouching just so, crossbow digging into his shoulder, but at the ready—the men were back-to-back, with Shane shuffling, bringing up the rear. They needed all sides covered, and they stepped in tandem through the thick of things. They'd come from the west, through the open. They hadn't expected the spill of walking corpses, but the east, through the cafeteria and infirmary was a bad move. The space was closed and with the sun setting its skull behind a copse of dying cumulus clouds, it would have been far too dark. The men each had a flashlight, but here, out in the open, they could cut to the side, they had space and they had lingering fingers of light. They massacred the dead with matter-of-fact routine, nearly immune to the overwhelming stench of death and rot. (Though wasn't it fucking worse after one fucking evening away? It cloyed and stuck close to the skin.) Shane had sweated through the black of his t-shirt and his hair, shorn from that night with Clem and Graham, was darker too, wet and hot. His expression was one of simple alertness with traces of disgust, but he wasn't panicking.
He never really did that, but, if he did, he wouldn't fucking do it now. Graham needed a firm friend, needed someone to keep a cool head in the overwrought drama of the apocalypse when his sister-in-law was plopped into fucking solitary confinement.
When they made it to B-Block, inside, the blood-slick, bone-honed shaft of an arrow thudded in the empty, red-black eye socket of a... man, skin peeled like a fucking mealy potato from the lurch of decomposing tendons, and face contorted in a terrible sort of fucking smile. The arrow brought the thing down to its knees, where it slumped in true death, somehow remaining upright. Shane moved toward it, breaking briefly from Graham, to retrieve the arrow as more and more and more of the things surrounded them, fresh meat, out in the open, as they continued to pour in from the bottleneck of A-Block, seemingly endless. He grunted. They needed to run. They were going to be fucking overrun. His glance, sharp, over his shoulder to Graham said as much. Run?
They were so close to the door to that snaking throat of tombs that lead from B-Block to... solitary. Shane could see it over Graham's head. All that stood between them and it was about a dozen walkers.]