The steady, monotonous beeping of a heart monitor pulled Rick Grimes from the void of unconsciousness.
His eyelids, weighted like iron gates rusted shut, fought against him as he blinked once—twice—before a sudden burst of sterile white light forced him to squint. The harsh fluorescence from above flickered with irregular intervals, casting jittering shadows across the cracked ceiling tiles.
The air was heavy with the acrid scent of disinfectant and plastic tubing. His throat was parched, dry as cotton. His limbs refused to move in unison. Groggy and disoriented, Rick shifted in bed with slow, uncertain effort. His muscles felt alien—atrophied, unresponsive.
A month-long coma will do that.
Clinically, disuse of skeletal muscles leads to profound weakness, especially in the legs. After just a week of immobilization, muscle fibers begin breaking down, balance deteriorates, and nerves misfire. Rick's body was betraying him.
He breathed slowly, deliberately. Eventually, after several minutes, the haze began to clear. He forced himself upright, pushing against the stiff mattress. A dull ache flared near his side—the old bullet wound, neatly sutured but still tender.
His gaze drifted to a bedside table. A vase of withered flowers stood there—petals dry and crumbling at the edges. He touched one; it disintegrated at his fingertip. A small card was tied to the vase's neck.
"Speedy recovery, Dad."
Rick stared. He didn't smile. He only swallowed hard. A heaviness gripped his chest.
The room was unnervingly still.
The monitor that had beeped seconds earlier had fallen silent. The once-flickering ceiling light had gone out. Rick's gaze drifted to the wall-mounted clock. Its second hand had stopped.
He reached up and removed the nasal cannula, the oxygen tubes peeling from dry skin. The electrodes on his chest came next, yanked free with little ceremony. He swung his legs off the bed, and as soon as his bare feet touched the linoleum floor, gravity reminded him just how long he'd been absent.
His knees buckled.
Muscles that hadn't borne weight in weeks crumpled under his frame, and he collapsed. Pain lanced up his thigh, his hip. But worse was the disorientation, the helplessness. He gritted his teeth and rasped, voice cracking from dehydration.
"Nurse! Nurse! Somebody—!"
Only silence answered. No echo. No intercom. No shoes hurried to meet him.
Rick dragged himself upright using the IV stand. The last drops of fluid in the bag had long since emptied. Dehydration burned behind his eyes, clouded his thinking. Staggering, he made his way to the restroom, turned on the faucet, and cupped his hands beneath the stream. He drank greedily, gulping water like a man lost in the desert.
Once steadied, he shuffled to the door.
It wouldn't open all the way. A gurney had been wedged in front of it from the outside. With effort, Rick shoved it aside. It squealed across the tile. Beyond the doorway, the hospital corridor stretched into darkness.
Ceiling panels had collapsed, leaving exposed beams and dangling fluorescent lights that buzzed and flickered. Electrical wires swung loosely overhead like vines in a dying jungle. Medical carts were overturned, their contents spilled across the floor—syringes, gauze, latex gloves, and shattered glass.
The walls bore smeared handprints—some brown, others unmistakably red. A wheelchair sat abandoned in the corner, its wheels slowly spinning. The air was thick, not just with rot, but emptiness. The kind of silence that swallows up questions.
"Where is everyone...?" Rick whispered. "What happened here?"
He made his way to the nurse's station. The landline on the counter was dead. He opened drawers, found little of use, a few matchbooks, a crushed granola bar, a rusting pair of trauma shears. His hands moved methodically, as his mind searched for reason in madness.
Then something caught his eye.
A flicker of movement down the hall. A figure.
He turned toward it—and froze.
It was a nurse. Or had been. Her scrubs hung in bloody shreds. Most of the skin on her face had been sloughed off, revealing weeping tissue and yellowed bone. Her eyes, clouded and dead, locked onto his.
And she moved.
Not shuffled. Not limped.
She lunged.
Rick stumbled back, horrified. A low, gurgling moan rattled from her throat, thick and wet, like a dying breath on repeat. He could see now, her jaw was broken, hanging loose, but still gnashing, eager.
He turned to flee—only to hear a low groan behind him.
Another one.
This walker was missing half its jaw entirely. The skin around its mouth had been torn away, revealing a raw red cavern that oozed black saliva. A length of IV tubing still trailed from its arm like a tail. Its hospital gown was soaked in dried blood, and chunks of its shoulder were simply gone.
Rick panicked. He grabbed whatever was on the ground—a metal bedpan, a clipboard, a splattered box of latex gloves—and hurled them at the creature. They bounced off with no effect. It didn't slow.
"Stay put!" a voice shouted down the hall.
Rick flinched. A human voice.
He turned toward it.
A figure was approaching fast. Tall. Dressed in civilian clothes, and the man was wearing a tactical vest. The lights flickered again—Rick couldn't make out the man's face.
"Help me!" Rick shouted hoarsely. "What the hell are they? What happened?!"
No answer.
The man didn't stop. He surged forward and, without breaking stride, stabbed the first walker cleanly through the skull—just above the eye socket. The body dropped instantly. The man yanked his knife free with a wet crack.
Another figure appeared behind Rick, dispatching the second walker with similar precision.
Rick turned, stunned, his breath ragged.
The first man looked at him grimly. "Those things we killed," he said, voice cold and calm, "aren't human anymore. And they are everywhere".
Rick stared. The words settled into his chest like lead. He felt the bottom fall out of his reality.
"Thank you," Rick muttered, shaken. "For saving me."
Before the stranger could respond, multiple footsteps echoed through the corridor. Three more people appeared from the shadows—alert, armed, but not tense.
A woman with a scoped rifle wearing civilians clothes, and both with tactical vests. And two other people also had just arrived and both of them are in civilian clothes while wearing tactical vests.
One of them called out, "Grant, everything alright? We heard shouting."
Grant. Rick made a mental note of the name. One of the two people who'd saved him.
They looked at Rick, and Grant nodded.
"Talk."
Rick swallowed and steadied his breath.
"My name's Rick Grimes. I'm—was—the sheriff here in King County. Took a bullet during a gunfight. I don't know how long I've been out. Woke up just now…"
x
"Anyone got extra clothes?" Grant asked, scanning his team.
"I brought some spares," Jasper replied, pulling open his pack.
"Give them to Rick so he can change out of that gown," Grant ordered, then gestured down the hallway. "You and Molly stay with him. The rest of us will sweep the hospital—check for medicine, equipment, anything we can use."
"Let's move," he added, his tone leaving no room for delay.
Jasper handed Rick a folded set of clothes: dark cargo pants, a gray thermal shirt, and a utility jacket. "It's not much, but it'll get the job done."
Rick took them with a grateful nod and stepped behind the nurse's station for some privacy. The gown slid off, and the fresh fabric felt alien but comforting against his skin.
"Thanks," Rick said, reemerging. "For the clothes."
"No problem," Jasper replied. Rick glanced down at his bare feet.
"Uh… do either of you have extra shoes?"
Jasper and Molly exchanged a glance before shaking their heads.
"Sorry," Molly said. "Maybe we'll find a pair on the way. Just… watch your step. Glass, wires—this place isn't friendly."
Rick nodded, then the three of them began weaving through the ruined hospital corridor. Rick walked cautiously, placing each foot as if the ground itself might bite. The walls whispered past them in silence, broken only by the creak of metal or a light buzz from a dying fluorescent fixture.
They passed through a pair of double doors. Painted across them in bold, erratic strokes of blood was a message:
DON'T OPEN — DEAD INSIDE
Rick stared at it as they moved past, jaw tightening. He didn't speak. No one did.
When they finally emerged into daylight, Rick stopped dead in his tracks.
The world he knew was gone.
The hospital's front lawn was overgrown—grass and weeds shoulder-high in places. Bushes had burst through the sidewalk. Cars littered the parking lot in frozen chaos: doors ajar, windshields shattered, blood smeared across some hoods. A flipped ambulance lay on its side, its red lights long since dead.
Across the street, homes were in ruins. Some had collapsed. Others were blackened from fire. A car lay overturned on a driveway.
And then he saw them.
Figures stumbling down the road. Slow. Rotting. Groaning. Dead eyes searching for movement. One of them dragged a twisted leg. Another had no jaw—just a yawning, empty hole dripping with viscera. They moved without purpose… yet toward everything.
Rick's breath hitched.
His face shifted through disbelief, grief, and cold dread. A man watching a dream dissolve into nightmare.
"What… what happened?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper. "Why are the dead walking?"
Molly looked at him, eyes solemn.
"They call it the Wildfire Virus," she said quietly. "Started as a series of strange deaths. CDC couldn't contain it. The infected die… and then come back. Reanimated. Mindless. Violent. The military tried to hold it together, but… it got too big, too fast."
Rick stared at the walkers in the street. "So the government failed…"
"Completely," Jasper said. "No more cities. No more police. No more law. Only people trying to survive."
Rick swallowed hard, heart pounding. "My wife… Lori. My son Carl. They might still be alive. I need to find them. Check our house. See if they left something behind."
Jasper looked at him, nodding slowly. "We're from a survivor camp. It's based on a farm. Grant set it up himself. It's possible your family made it there."
He pulled out a handheld radio and glanced at Rick. "Names?"
"Lori Grimes. Carl Grimes. My wife and son."
Jasper keyed the mic. "This is Jasper. Anyone at base, respond. We've got a survivor here asking about family. Names are Lori Grimes and Carl Grimes—do we have them?"
A long pause followed. Then static crackled.
"Negative. No Lori or Carl Grimes at this camp."
Jasper exhaled. "Copy. Thanks." He looked at Rick, regret on his face. "I'm sorry."
Rick clenched his fists but didn't reply.
Just then, Grant and two others emerged from the hospital entrance, their backpacks loaded. One of them was Ghost—the man in the skull-patterned balaclava. The other, a woman named Nina, had an oxygen concentrator strapped to her back and held a portable defibrillator in one hand.
"Got what we could," Grant said. "Antibiotics, morphine, two heart monitors, an infusion pump, portable oxygen unit, and an AED."
Rick looked at him. This man, he's the one in charge, Rick realized. Their leader.
Rick stepped forward. "Grant," he said, voice still hoarse, "will you help me? Find my family?"
Grant didn't answer immediately. He studied Rick for a moment, his worn face, desperate eyes.
Then he nodded. "Yeah. We'll help you."
He turned to the others. "Jasper. Molly. Nina. Head back to the farm. Get the supplies sorted. Tell them we're staying behind to assist."
"You got it," Jasper said, already slinging his pack.
"What about you two?" Rick asked.
Grant jerked a thumb at the silent man beside him. "This is Ghost. He's coming with me. We'll move fast, check your house. See what we can turn up."
"Thank you," Rick said, his voice tight.
Grant looked him in the eye. "We stick together, Sheriff. We look out for our own."