Chapter 6: The Attack - Part 1
Jake's death sense screamed.
The feeling hit him like a physical blow, fifteen hollow voids materializing at the very edge of his perception. They moved through the forest with the inexorable patience of hunting spiders, converging on the camp from multiple directions.
This is it. This is the night.
Jake launched himself from his watch position, sprinting toward the nearest cluster of pots and pans. His hands closed around a metal ladle and a cast-iron skillet, and he began beating them together with desperate fury.
"WAKE UP! WAKE UP! EVERYONE UP NOW!"
The noise shattered the peaceful night like a gunshot. Tent zippers flew open, faces appearing in bewildered panic. Rick emerged from his tent with his Colt Python already drawn, eyes scanning for threats. Shane rolled out of his sleeping bag and came up with his shotgun, the weapon tracking toward Jake with lethal precision.
"What's happening?" Rick shouted over the clanging metal.
"They're coming!" Jake dropped the makeshift alarm and pointed toward the treeline. "From the woods! Multiple directions!"
Dale's voice crackled from the RV: "I don't see anything!"
Jake's death sense painted the approaching threat in stark detail. Sixteen walkers, moving with the shuffling gait he knew by heart. Thirty seconds until the first ones broke cover. Maybe forty-five until the attack began in earnest.
The extra warning he'd provided would have to be enough.
The first walker emerged from the shadows like a nightmare made flesh—a construction worker whose hard hat had fused with his skull, safety vest hanging in bloody tatters. Behind him came more: a soccer mom still wearing her SUV keys around her neck, a teenager whose letterman jacket bore the stains of his final meal, an elderly man dragging a broken walker frame.
Screaming erupted across the camp. Not the controlled shouts of trained fighters, but the raw, animal terror of people confronting death in its most primal form. Children cried. Adults cursed. Equipment clattered as people scrambled for weapons.
Jake's head swiveled, tracking threats and calculating distances. Three walkers had split off from the main group, moving toward the smaller tents where Carol and Sophia slept. His blood turned to ice.
"Not them. Anyone but them."
He sprinted across the camp, leaping over guy-lines and scattered equipment. Behind him, gunfire erupted as Rick and Shane opened up on the main cluster of walkers. The sharp crack of rifles mixed with the deeper boom of Dale's shotgun from atop the RV.
The three walkers reached Carol's tent just as she and Sophia emerged, both wearing thin nightgowns and matching expressions of absolute terror. The closest walker—a office worker with a tie still knotted around his throat—lunged forward with hungry arms outstretched.
Jake threw himself between them, weaponless and desperate. His medical training screamed that this was suicide, that he should find a gun or knife or anything other than bare hands. But there was no time, no other option.
The walker's fingers closed around Jake's shoulder, and he could smell the creature's breath—rotten meat and stomach acid and something else, something sweet and terrible that his mind refused to process. The thing's mouth opened wide, revealing teeth stained with old blood.
Terror and desperation collided in Jake's mind, triggering something primal and powerful. His consciousness reached out like a fist, slamming into the walkers' primitive nervous systems with all the force he could muster.
"STOP! STOP! STOP!"
The command wasn't spoken aloud—it erupted directly from his mind into theirs, bypassing their limited cognitive functions and speaking to whatever residual brain stem activity still flickered in those decaying skulls.
All three walkers froze.
For seven endless seconds, they stood motionless as statues, their arms still reaching but their bodies locked in place. The office worker's mouth hung open inches from Jake's throat, close enough that he could see the maggots writhing between its teeth.
The moment stretched like taffy, time dilating under the weight of supernatural intervention. Jake felt something warm and wet running from his nose, tasted copper in his mouth, but he held on with everything he had.
Then Daryl's crossbow sang.
The bolt took the office worker in the temple, punching through bone and brain matter with a wet thunk. The creature collapsed like a marionette with severed strings, its reaching hands falling to its sides.
Two more bolts followed in rapid succession, dropping the remaining walkers before Jake's control could slip. He released his mental grip and immediately crumpled to his knees, blood gushing from his nose in a crimson torrent.
"Jesus Christ," Daryl breathed, lowering his crossbow. His pale eyes were wide with something between awe and terror. "What the hell was that?"
Jake couldn't answer. The world spun around him like a carnival ride, his vision fracturing into kaleidoscope fragments. The psychic backlash felt like someone had driven an ice pick through his skull and wiggled it around. Blood dripped from his nose onto the dirt, dark spots in the firelight.
"Jake!" Carol's voice cut through the haze of pain. She knelt beside him, one arm around Sophia's shoulders, her free hand reaching toward his face. "You're bleeding!"
"I'm okay," Jake managed, though the words came out slurred. "Are you hurt? Either of you?"
"We're fine." Carol's voice was thick with emotion. "You saved us. How did you—"
A woman's scream cut through the night like a blade.
Jake's head snapped up despite the agony, his death sense automatically scanning for new threats. But what he felt made his heart stop. Near the RV, two figures struggled in the flickering firelight. One vertical, one horizontal. One living, one dead.
One was Amy Harrison, and the other was feeding.
"NO!"
Jake tried to stand and immediately fell, his equilibrium shot to hell by the necromantic backlash. He crawled instead, his vision clearing just enough to see the full horror of the scene.
Amy lay beside the RV's rear bumper, her yellow shirt torn and bloody. A walker in a nurse's uniform crouched over her, its teeth buried in the soft flesh between neck and shoulder. Amy's face was chalk-white with shock, her eyes wide and staring at nothing.
Andrea knelt beside them both, screaming her sister's name while beating uselessly at the walker's head with her bare fists. The creature ignored her, too focused on its meal to care about anything else.
Jake reached them just as Dale's shotgun boomed overhead, the blast removing the walker's head in a spray of gore and bone fragments. But it was too late. The damage was done. Amy's blood pooled beneath her in an expanding crimson lake.
"No, no, no," Andrea chanted, pressing her hands against the wound. "You're going to be okay, Amy. You're going to be fine."
But Jake's death sense told him a different story. Amy's life force was already fading, flickering like a candle in a hurricane. The bite had torn through major arteries. She was bleeding out fast.
"I can fix this. I have to fix this. The alchemy, the equivalent exchange—"
Jake placed his hands over the wound, feeling for the damage with senses both medical and mystical. The bite was deep, ragged, contaminated with walker saliva that already carried the infection deeper into her system. But if he could seal the arteries, stop the bleeding, maybe buy her time—
He reached out with his power, trying to transmute the torn tissue back together. The effort required raw materials, matter to work with, and he pulled desperately from the earth beneath his hands. Dirt and minerals flowed up through his palms, transforming into clotting factors and cellular matrix.
The wound began to close.
For a moment, hope flared in Jake's chest. The bleeding slowed, then stopped entirely. Amy's face regained some color. Andrea's sobs turned to gasps of disbelief.
Then the infection hit.
Jake felt it like acid in his veins—the walker pathogen racing through Amy's bloodstream faster than his healing could follow. His alchemy could repair tissue, could seal wounds and mend bones, but it couldn't fight the fundamental wrongness that turned the living into the hungry dead.
The effort of trying tore through him like shrapnel. Blood poured from his nose and mouth, his hands cracking and bleeding where they touched Amy's skin. The psychic feedback from touching the infection was indescribable—like grasping a live wire made of distilled death.
Amy's eyes fluttered open, focused briefly on her sister's face, and whispered, "I'm sorry."
Then she was gone.
Jake knelt beside the bodies—Amy so still, Andrea sobbing over her sister's corpse—and felt something break inside his chest. His first real chance to save someone, to prove his powers could make a difference, and he'd failed. Failed completely and utterly, despite abilities that should have made him a god among mortals.
Around him, the battle raged on. Gunfire and screams filled the night air as the camp fought for its life. But Jake barely heard it. All his attention was focused on Amy Harrison's slack face and the weight of his own inadequacy.
He had the power to command the dead and bend matter to his will, but he couldn't save one girl from a bite.
What good were godlike abilities if they came with human limitations?
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