The Empty C Block

New chapter is live.

Settle in, take your time, and let's see what waits in the dark 🖤

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Evan did not know what happened after he and Shane left.

Behind them, a man stumbled out of the administration building and ran onto the grass.

"Jim?"

"Hey, man. You all right?"

T-Dog looked at Jim, who had barely managed to pull his baseball cap on, and frowned.

Jim's whole face was slick with sweat.

His skin, already pale, had gone bloodless. He bent forward with both hands braced on his knees, breathing in slow, thin pulls.

"I'm... I'm fine," Jim said. "I just suddenly... something feels wrong."

His thin shirt was soaked through.

Yet he felt no heat. Cold rose from the inside out, seeping all the way into his bones.

By the time Jim said it, the whole camp had turned to look.

Before anyone could ask another question, Jim ran across the grass like a man losing his mind.

He snatched up the shovel Evan had left there yesterday and drove it into the earth where Evan had dug the pit.

When he reached almost ten feet down, he found the pile of walker bodies.

Then Jim froze.

At the center of the corpse heap, there was an empty space.

Enough room for several more bodies.

Only then did Jim seem to breathe again.

His strength left him, and he fell backward.

Through blurring vision, he saw Rick leading people toward him.

"Wrong..." Jim whispered. "Something's wrong..."

Inside the Prison, in Cell Block C, the darkness seemed deep enough to swallow everything.

Once the back door closed behind them, even the last thread of sunlight felt stained and cut off.

Evan walked in front. Shane followed behind.

Neither of them hurried.

In the narrow corridor, each could hear the other's breathing.

They moved carefully, checking the floor before every step.

For Evan, though, the hallway was almost as clear as daylight.

He thought the command to turn on the light.

The Helmet Light Mod set into his helmet flared, illuminating a broad patch ahead. Only Evan could see it.

The effective range was not especially long. Past thirty feet, details blurred into darkness.

For the Prison corridors, that was enough.

"Shane, take the map."

Evan handed over the hand-drawn paper.

For himself, he opened Map and used the gray fog covering the area to judge direction from memory.

Once he placed a small red flag on Map, a matching marker appeared before his eyes, visible through the walls and pointing toward the destination.

'With Map, I shouldn't get lost.'

'But I don't know how many walkers are inside or where they are. Let's hope nothing goes sideways.'

Fortunately, the route from C Block's back entrance was almost uneventful.

Evan and Shane passed through a twisting corridor, went by the showers and the public restrooms, and met only one walker along the way.

Everything else was bodies.

Corrections officers.

Inmates.

Human corpses.

Walker corpses with bullet holes through their heads.

Only when they reached the C Block cells did Evan begin to understand.

"So that's what happened..."

He rubbed his chin.

"What?" Shane prodded a corpse with the muzzle of his shotgun. Once he confirmed it truly would not move, he turned back to Evan.

"Notice anything? We barely saw walkers on the way in. Mostly bodies."

"A whole cell block full of inmates shouldn't have this few dead in it, even if it's only one section."

"So I'm guessing the inmates were being moved when everything happened."

"You said the Prison keeps most inmate activities inside the facility. Food, confinement, recreation, work, all of it."

"Then maybe most of the inmates from C Block were the walkers locked outside behind that iron gate."

Shane thought of the gate Glenn had locked.

He had not counted every walker inside, but from memory alone, there had to be more than a hundred.

Then Shane caught the problem too.

"No. A prison this size couldn't have only a hundred inmates in one section."

"Unless..."

His eyes shifted, and he looked at Evan.

One glance was enough to show they had reached the same conclusion.

"Exactly," Evan said. "Unless the Prison has several smaller exercise yards. Different inmates get yard time separately."

"If the rest of C Block wasn't in the yard, then they were probably packed into the corridors when everything happened. They couldn't get out, and all of them were infected or killed here."

"A prison this big turned into a dead city."

As Evan spoke, he crouched beside a dead officer and found a key ring.

"Not all bad news, though. Looks like our luck isn't terrible."

He shook the keys. They jingled softly in his hand.

This was C Block's key ring, which meant they would not have to break every door by force.

At the sound, several rotten arms shot through the bars on the second floor of the cell block.

The hands clawed through the gaps, hungry moans scraping down from above.

Evan looked up at the locked doors in surprise, then glanced back at Shane with a grin.

"Looks like the guys upstairs had bad timing. Solitary confinement at the end of the world."

"They starved to death in there, didn't they?"

Shane drew his machete and climbed the stairs.

Hearing Evan, he nodded.

"No wonder these idiots look weak."

"Locked in here, starved while they were alive, and still hungry after they died."

As he spoke, Shane put them down one by one.

With the cell doors in the way, Evan did not bother competing for the kills.

For someone like him, who got stronger by killing walkers, the whole Prison was a treasure trove.

There was no need to care about two or three locked-up scraps.

They spent roughly an hour checking the C Block cells from end to end.

Only after confirming every remaining walker was dead and nothing had been missed did they lock one of the C Block gates and move toward the passage connecting C Block to B Block.

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