The dirt yard of the farm smelled like sun-baked manure, crushed sweetgrass and the sharp, hot metallic tang of the two engines cooling down in the shade of the great oak
trees. Clementine let go of the big man's hand for just a second to smooth down the front of her white dress, her small fingers tracking the lines of grit that had settled into the fabric during the bumpy ride. Everything out here felt too big. The sky was an enormous, pale blue bowl that didn't have any buildings to block it and the white two-story farmhouse looked
like it had been dropped right into the middle of nowhere.
"Alright, everybody out," Shawn called out, swinging his legs out of the truck cab and slamming the heavy metal door shut with a loud clank.
From the back of the massive, idling motorhome, a woman with kind, tired eyes and short blonde hair stepped down onto the gravel. She wore a green shirt. She immediately hurried over to the loud boy, Duck, pulling him into a tight hug that smelled faintly of lavender soap and clean laundry.
"Oh, thank goodness," she murmured, her voice thick with a strange, soft accent as she checked his face for scratches. "Kenny, they're alright. They're all right."
The man with the thick mustache—Kenny—stepped out from the driver's side of the RV, wiping his greasy palms on his jeans. He looked around the yard with a hard, measuring stare, his eyes jumping from the massive red barn to the long gravel driveway they had just driven up. "Name's Kenny," he said, offering a rough hand to Lee, who was leaning heavily against the side of the pickup truck, his bad leg twitching with pain. "This is my wife, Katjaa. And that ball of fire over there is Ken Jr., but we just call him Duck."
"Lee," the big man panted, shaking Kenny's hand while keeping his other arm stretched out slightly behind him, making sure Clementine was still within arm's reach. "And this is Clementine."
Before anyone could say anything else, the screen door of the main house let out a sharp screeech and banged against the wood frame. An older man with a thick white beard and a faded plaid shirt stepped onto the porch. He walked with a heavy, deliberate stomp, his hands resting on his hips as his gray eyes swept across the crowded driveway.
"Shawn!" the older man called out, his deep voice carrying easily across the yard. "What's all this? I told you to go look for Chet, not bring back a whole town."
"Dad, Chet's gone," Shawn said, his shoulders dropping as he walked up the porch steps. "He... he didn't make it. And these folks were stranded out on the main road. They didn't have a car, and Lee here has a real bad leg."
Hershel Greene stood at the top of the steps for a long, silent moment. His face looked like it was carved out of an old tree root—deep lines etched into his forehead and a mouth that didn't seem to like smiling very much. He looked at Lee's bloody temple, then at Katjaa and Kenny and finally down at Clementine. His expression softened just a tiny bit, his large, calloused hand reaching up to scratch his beard. "Alright," he sighed, the tension in his
voice dropping slightly. "We don't turn away folks in need. Shawn, go get some water from the pump. Katjaa, if you're a vet like Kenny says, I've got some supplies in the shed if you need to look at that man's leg."
While the adults gathered in a tight circle near the porch, their voices turning into a low, rumbling hum of explanations and questions about the riots in Atlanta, Clementine took a step back. She didn't want to listen to them talk about the monsters anymore. Every time Lee spoke about the kitchen or the highway, her stomach felt like it was full of cold water.
She turned around, her eyes searching the wide gravel yard until she spotted the dark hoodie.
Jonah hadn't stayed with the group. He hadn't even waited for Hershel to finish speaking. He was already thirty yards away, walking along the edge of the wooden rail fence that separated the driveway from the main horse pasture. He moved like a ghost—his heavy hiking boots making absolutely no sound against the loose stones, his short, stark-white hair bright against the green background of the fields.
Clementine glanced back at Lee, who was busy listening to Katjaa explain how to clean the cut on his head and then she quickly trotted across the yard to follow the boy. Her little
sneakers made a rhythmic crunch-crunch-crunch in the dirt, a sharp contrast to Jonah's absolute silence.
Jonah didn't stop when she caught up to him. He didn't even turn his head to look at her but she knew he knew she was there. His bright red eyes were fixed on the wooden fence posts. He walked with his left hand extended, his small, brown fingers lightly brushing against the weathered timber. Every few feet, he would stop, push his weight against a post and watch how much it groaned or bent in the dirt.
"What are you doing?" Clementine asked, keeping her voice low.
"Checking the structural integrity of the fence," Jonah said. The words came out flat and short, like he was reading them off a piece of paper. He reached a corner where the fence
met a dense line of wild blackberry bushes and stopped. He stood perfectly still, his
crimson eyes tracing the thick canopy of leaves where the forest pressed up against the farm's perimeter.
"The wood is old," Jonah muttered, his adult-sounding voice completely out of place in his small body. "Two pieces are completely rotted near the base. A heavy weight will push them right over."
Clementine squinted at the bushes. To her, it just looked like a pretty spot with lots of green leaves. "Are we going to play a game? My friend Alfred and I used to play hide-and-seek in the bushes behind the school."
"No," Jonah said. He turned his body toward the massive red barn, his gaze shifting up to the high window and then down to the heavy sliding doors on the ground floor. "This isn't a game."
Clementine followed him as he walked toward the barn. While Duck was over by the porch, jumping up and down and pretending to shoot imaginary monsters with a stick, Jonah was moving with a strange, quiet purpose. He walked around the entire backside of the barn where the shadows were long and cool. The air back here smelled like old hay, dust and
rust.
Jonah stopped near a small, broken window frame near the rear foundation. He reached
down, picked up a discarded pieces of rusted wire from the dirt and measured the distance between two wooden slats with his eyes.
"There's a blind spot here," Jonah whispered, almost to himself. He tapped the branch against his thigh with a faint thud-thud sound. "The house blocks the view from the front porch. If something comes out of the eastern fields, nobody will see it until it's already against the wall."
Clementine watched his face closely. His skin was a warm, light brown and the small diagonal scar under his left eye didn't move at all because his facial muscles were
completely frozen. He didn't look like any of the boys in her second-grade class. The boys at school were always sticky, always yelling and always dropping their crayons. Jonah felt like a grown-up who had been shrunk down and stuffed into a child's clothes but his mind had stayed big.
"Why do you look at everything like that?" she asked, her voice dropping into a tiny whisper as she stepped closer to his side. "Like you're looking for something bad?"
Jonah finally turned his head to look at her. His red eyes were very bright in the shadow of the barn wall, staring into hers with a chilling lack of emotion. "Because everything out here
is going to break," he said simply. "The adults think this is a temporary problem. They think if they sit on the porch and talk long enough, the world will go back to the way it was."
He raised the branch, pointing the dark, blood-crusted tip toward the main road where Kenny's RV was parked.
"It's not going back," Jonah said, his flat tone sending a sudden, cold shiver straight down Clementine's back. "The fences are just lines in the dirt. They don't stop the dead. If you don't know where the weak points are, you get trapped."
Clementine swallowed hard, her small fingers wrapping around the hem of her white dress. She looked back toward the front yard. She could see Lee sitting on the porch steps now,
holding a white cloth to his head while Hershel handed him a glass of water. Kenny was gesturing wildly with his arms, pointing toward the highway, his face red from the heat. They looked so loud, so messy and so full of panic.
But when she looked back at Jonah, he was already moving again. He had walked over to the edge of the cornfield, his eyes tracking the long, straight rows of green stems that stretched out into the distance. He stood right at the boundary where the dirt met the
crops, his body perfectly rigid, his pulled-up dark hoodie making him look like a small crow waiting to fly.
He was studying the spacing between the rows, calculating how easily a body could slide through the green leaves without shaking the stems. He was mapping out the danger before it even had a shape.
Clementine slowly walked over and stood a few feet behind him. She didn't understand what "structural integrity" meant, and she didn't like looking at the rotted fence posts but as she watched Jonah's small, steady hands grip the branch, the cold water feeling in her stomach began to fade. He wasn't crying and he wasn't screaming. In a world where everything had gone completely crazy in a single afternoon, the boy with the white hair felt like the only thing that wasn't shaking.
A sudden, heavy step crunched on the gravel behind them.
Clementine jumped, spinning around quickly, her heart fluttering into her throat.
Hershel Greene was standing at the corner of the barn, his large arms crossed over his
chest, his thick white beard bristling in the slight breeze. He wasn't looking at Clementine. His gray eyes were locked onto Jonah, his heavy brows drawn down into a long, dark line that made his forehead look even wrinklier than before.
The old farmer had been watching them. He had watched the white-haired boy walk the entire perimeter of his land, testing the gates, measuring the blind spots and staring into the fields with those strange, bloody eyes.
"Son," Hershel said, his deep voice dropping into a low, gravelly rumble that felt heavy with suspicion. "You've been walking my lines for fifteen minutes now. You want to tell me what it is you're looking for on my farm?"
Jonah didn't flinch. He didn't drop the branch. He slowly turned his body around to face the old man, his crimson eyes locking onto Hershel's face with an absolute, terrifying lack of fear.