At the prison.
"H-help me." Gorman pleaded while reaching his hand out towards his colleagues. Merle had badly beaten him and his words were barely discernable. He also lost one of his front teeth.
When they heard the news, Shepherd and her colleagues quickly came to check what was going on and pushed through the crowd and were just in time to witness the scene of Merle throwing Gorman to the ground.
"What had he done wrong?" Shepherd turned towards Merle. She didn't even try to help him, she never liked him anyway. Those closer to him were the ones who checked on him and the extent of his injuries.
"He tried to rape Carol. We are not good people, but trash like him does not deserve to live here. So, I say we exile him!" Someone among the crowd responded to her words.
"Execute him instead!"
"Let's feed him to the walkers!"
Shepherd and her colleagues clearly became nervous. They cursed Gorman in their minds as his actions will obviously implicate them, even those who tried to help him belatedly realized that their small actions today might change how the others would treat them.
From afar, Rick just watched them in interest. The crowd sounded rowdy, but they were actually controlling the sound of their voices.
"Enough!"
A single shout quickly made everyone shut their mouths. Everyone turned to look towards the owner of the voice and saw Hershel walking over as the crowd parted before him. Behind him were Andrea, Maggie and Glenn.
Hershel looked at Merle, who just shrugged his shoulders. Then towards Rick, who is watching them from afar with no intention of taking charge of the chaos.
He just sighed and addressed everyone. "As much as I hate to say it, but we're not exiling, executing nor feeding this man to the walkers."
"Daryl, Glenn, lock him up. He will be judged when Michael and the others return. For the rest of you, go back to what you were doing."
No one voiced any complaints. If Michael was someone to be feared, then Hershel was the opposite of him. He is someone they can approach easily and vent their frustrations to, like a counselor.
"Carol. I know you just went through something horrible. But you'll be coming with us. We have much to discuss."
The boat sailed through between barrier islands and marsh grass in the long, winding stretch of the ICW that made the miles feel longer than they were.
"This is going to take a while," Jack said, watching the shoreline crawl past.
"Better slow than sunk," Rosita said, hands steady on the wheel.
They encountered an abandoned yacht an hour later, a big one, forty feet at least, listing hard to one side where it had run aground on a sandbar sometime ago. The name on the stern had faded past reading, but the deck was still visible from the water, and on it, multiple walkers stood pressed against the railing, drawn by the sound of their engines, groaning low and constant across the distance.
Some even fell onto the water.
"Guess that's one way to try and get away from it all," Jack said as he watched the scenes with a grim look.
"Didn't work out for them," Michael said.
They passed two more before the hour was out, smaller boats, sailboats mostly, anchored or drifting, a walker or two visible on each, still wearing whatever they'd been wearing the night the world ended. Vacation clothes, mostly. Bright colors have gone dull with weather and time.
Nobody said much after the second one. There wasn't much to say.
They are already used to this kind of sights.
The obstacles started not long after.
A sunken fishing boat, its cabin barely breaking the surface, forced Rosita to cut the throttle and thread a careful path around the wreck, the boat's hull passing close enough to the exposed rigging that made everyone nervous.
"Slowly but surely," Rosita muttered, more to herself than anyone.
A while after that, a small runabout drifted across their path with no one aboard, its mooring line trailing loose behind it in the water, clearly torn free from wherever it had once been tied. Rosita eased around it without much trouble, but it was the third one that was barely visible until they were nearly on top of it, that made her curse under her breath and cut hard to starboard, the boat's hull groaning as it swung wide.
"Things are getting worse," Michonne said, watching the runabout slide past off the port side.
"Yeah." Rosita kept her eyes on the water ahead, on the debris field slowly thickening the further south they went. "Nobody's been keeping this channel clear, and who'd even bother with what's happening around us?"
They slowed further after that, Rosita cutting their speed almost in half just to keep enough reaction time between spotting a hazard and having to deal with it. The journey got tedious fast, as the long stretch of open water was broken up by sudden, careful maneuvering around wreckage that seemed to multiply the closer they got to the state line.
The sky had turned grey by the time they had finally crossed into Florida. Though nothing marked the moment except a road sign half-submerged near the shoreline, rusted and peeling, the state's name barely discernible beneath a crust of salt and grime.
"There it is," Jack said, nodding toward it. "Welcome to Florida."
Nobody celebrated.
Twenty minutes later, they found the boat that ended the day's progress. A large cabin cruiser, sixty feet or longer, sitting fully sunk in the middle of the waterway, only the flybridge and a portion of the upper deck still breaking the surface. The channel narrowed sharply on either side of it, shallow water and half-visible debris crowding both edges.
Rosita slowed the boat to an idle, studying the wreck. "We can go around it. It's gonna be tight, but it's doable."
Michael didn't answer right away. He stood at the rail, looking at the narrow gap on either side of the wreck, then back the way they'd come — at the string of obstacles they'd already had to navigate, each one slower and more dangerous than the last.
"We're not doing that," he said finally.
Rosita glanced back at him. "We just crossed the state line. You want to turn around now?"
"Let's pause and think before we push through a channel that is choked. We also have no idea if there are any ambushes at the sides if we try to go around it." Michael calmly surveyed their surroundings. "Every one of these obstacles has forced us to slow down and commit to a narrow path, and our situation right now is exactly the kind of spot somebody would pick if they wanted an easy target."
Jack was quiet for a second, then nodded slowly. "He's got a point. We've entered unfamiliar territory right now. It does not hurt to be careful."
"So what do you want to do then?" Rosita asked.
"There was a dock a ways back." Michael looked out at the water behind them, retracing the route in his head. "Let's turn around, and make our stop there for the night, and figure out the rest tomorrow instead of pushing through blind through the dark."
Rosita wasn't against the idea since they probably only have around an hour left before the sky darkens completely. Pushing through without a proper plan is not something she's also fond of.
"I have no problems with it. Besides, we're also running low on fuel." she said, and brought the boat around, easing back the way they'd come while the sunken cruiser slipped slowly out of sight behind them.