Lucien, for his part, had no idea that Rick was having some kind of emotional revelation about three feet away from him. What he noticed was that Rick had gone quiet. And the cop wasn't the type to zone out like that. Something was off.
Was this a bad thing? Had he done something wrong?
He set down the spray can.
"Sorry... did I cause you some trouble? If this is a bit much, I can always—"
"No. Lucien."
Rick took a breath, stepped forward, and pulled the kid into a hug. Lucien stiffened for a second, he wasn't used to that kind of thing, not from anyone outside his previous family, before relaxing slightly.
The cop let go and crouched down so they were eye to eye.
"You did good. It's just..." He scratched the back of his neck. "I feel terrible that none of us thought of this before you did."
Lucien blinked. "Oh. That's... you don't need to..."
"Yeah, I do." Rick's voice was quiet. "Let's finish it together. Come on."
Lucien studied his face for another second, searching for any trace of dishonesty. He found none. The knot in his stomach loosened, and he smiled.
"Right," he said. "Yeah. Let's do it."
They settled back down, Rick holding the edges of the bedsheet while Lucien added the final passes. The spray paint hissed in the quiet afternoon air.
They worked in silence for a few minutes before Rick finally spoke, "There's something else I want to talk to you about. It concerns your situation and your identity."
Lucien's hand paused on the spray can. "My identity?"
Rick set down the edge of the sheet and turned to face him properly. He looked uncomfortable. Like a man who'd rehearsed a speech in his head and now couldn't remember the words.
"When things started going bad in Atlanta, people assumed you were my son. I didn't correct them. It was the fastest way to make people care about finding you, and I made that call without really thinking it through. Even Carl asked about you before I left to come find you."
A slight smile crossed his face. "He wanted me to bring you back. He even made me promise."
He raised a hand before Lucien could respond. "I'm sorry about that. You deserved to have a say."
Lucien stared at him. Of all the things he'd been expecting Rick to say, that hadn't been one of them.
"Carl? Your son?"
"The one and only." Rick scratched the back of his neck. "He doesn't know you yet, obviously. But he knows what you did for me. And he's a good kid. He just wanted to make sure you had somewhere to go."
He paused, choosing his next words carefully. "Lori and I talked about it. If you want, you can stay with us at the camp. We've got the space, and you shouldn't have to figure this out on your own. Not after everything you've been through."
Lucien stared at him for a long moment.
It was a simple offer. A kid with no family needed a place to stay, and Rick had room. On the surface, there was nothing complicated about it. But it was not nothing. Staying with Rick's family meant being close to the people at the center of the camp. It meant stability.
It was not as though he would be completely on his own. At the moment, at least two of the camp's more influential figures, Shane and Merle, already seemed to like him well enough. Rick had also mentioned that people had been sent out early that morning to pick up Morgan's family. If the camp was willing to do that for them, it would likely be willing to look out for him as well.
And the offer had come from Carl. A kid Lucien had never met, who had no reason to care about a stranger, had specifically asked his dad to bring him home.
Something warm and faintly uncomfortable settled in Lucien's chest. He pushed the feeling down before it could show on his face.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that'd be good. Thanks, Rick."
Rick nodded, clearly relieved. "Good. Carl's going to be happy."
They looked at each other for a second.
Then he picked up the bedsheet again. "Let's finish this sign before we lose the light."
---
Leaving the nursing home took longer than expected.
Rick made a decision that surprised everyone, including Lucien. He opened the gun bag and started pulling out weapons.
"We're leaving some of these here," he said, laying out two handguns and a box of ammunition on the nursing home's front table.
Daryl's head snapped up. "You're kidding."
"They need them more than we do right now." Rick's tone didn't invite argument. "Guillermo's crew is five guys with one rifle and a crossbow defending a building full of people who can't fight back. We've got a camp with twenty adults and more weapons than we brought today."
"We just risked our asses getting that bag back—"
"I know." Rick looked at him steadily. "And I'm asking you to trust me on this."
Daryl opened his mouth, closed it, and looked away. Merle, for once, said nothing.
Guillermo watched the whole exchange from the doorway of the nursing home. When Rick held out the guns, he took them without a word. He turned them over in his hands, checked the magazines, and looked back up at Rick.
Then he disappeared inside the building and came back a minute later carrying a small cardboard box. Inside: four cans of food, two bottles of antibiotics still in their pharmacy packaging, and a handful of bandage rolls.
"No," Rick said immediately. "Keep those. You need—"
Guillermo walked right past him and handed the box directly to Lucien.
"Put these in your pack."
Lucien looked up at him in surprise. Guillermo's expression was complicated. The muscles around his eyes tried to soften, but his jaw refused to follow.
"What you did for Derek," Guillermo said. "And for the old folks in there. That's worth more than a few cans of beans." He glanced at Rick. "Both of you. This is what you deserve."
He extended his hand to Rick, who took it and gripped it firmly. They held the handshake for a moment longer than necessary.
Then they let go, and just like that, the Atlanta adventure was over.
---
The truck rumbled back to life, the engine growling as Rick pulled onto the road leading out of the city. Everyone piled in. Rick drove, Glenn rode shotgun, and the rest crammed into the back alongside the gun bag, Lucien's hiking pack, and nearly thirty pounds of supplies they hadn't had when they walked into Atlanta.
The cab was quiet for approximately forty-five seconds.
"So," Daryl said from the back seat. "We went back into Atlanta, almost got killed about six times, Glenn got kidnapped, I got the shit beat out of me, and we're driving home with fewer guns than we left with. That about cover it?"
"We also brought back medicine," Rick pointed out.
"Barely."
"Oh, now you want to complain?" Merle leaned forward from the far corner, his bandaged wrist cradled against his chest. "When I said we should grab the gun bag before we left, where were you? Staring at your shoes?"
Daryl didn't have a good answer for that, and they all knew it.
Lucien, who had been quietly watching the exchange from his spot wedged between T-Dog and the gun bag, decided to end the standoff before it could restart.
"That intersection up ahead, are we out of the city yet? We should probably put the sign up soon, before it gets dark."
Everyone in the truck paused. Rick glanced in the rearview mirror, then back at the road ahead. "Yeah, that works. Let me find somewhere to pull over."
He eased the truck to a stop on the shoulder of the road, in a stretch where the pavement was clear and visibility was good in both directions. A few abandoned cars dotted the landscape, but no walkers in sight.
He killed the engine and turned in his seat. "Right. Everyone out. Lucien's got something to show you."
"Show us what?" Glenn asked, already unbuckling.
Rick just nodded toward the back of the truck, where the bedsheet was rolled up next to Lucien's pack. It took about thirty seconds to explain the idea. It took about ten seconds for everyone to get it.
T-Dog was the first to react. He slapped his own forehead. "Are you serious? Why didn't any of us think of that?"
Glenn was already reaching for the sheet, unrolling it carefully. His eyes moved across the words and his face broke into a wide grin. "This is brilliant. Okay, I can definitely help hang this up. I did some climbing in college, I can get it high enough to be visible from the road."
Daryl jumped down from the truck without another word. He grabbed the toolbox from the back, rummaged through it, and pulled out a pair of pliers and some wire. Then he looked at Lucien. "Where are we putting it?"
Lucien pointed to a concrete highway signpost about twenty yards away. It was the kind of green interstate marker bolted to a metal pole sunk deep into the ground. It looked sturdy and highly visible.
"Up there. High as we can get it."
Daryl nodded once and headed for the post.
That left Merle.
He was still leaning against the truck, arms crossed, well, one arm crossed, the other held at his side, watching the others get to work.
Lucien walked over to him, holding a length of rebar in one hand and a hammer in the other.
"Your hand's still healing. You probably shouldn't be doing heavy lifting. Why don't you just stay here and rest?"
Merle's eye twitched.
"The hell did you just say, kid?"
"I said you should rest. Your bandages are still fresh, so no strenuous activity for at least—"
"Strenuous activity?" Merle pushed off the truck, his good hand clenching into a fist. "You think one missing hand slows me down? I could do more with one hand than half these people could do with two and a goddamn ladder!"
Lucien tilted his head. Then he held out the hammer and the rebar.
"Prove it, then. We need this driven into the ground to anchor the sign."
He tapped the rebar lightly against the asphalt. The metal rang against the concrete.
Merle stared at the rebar. It was thick, about the diameter of his thumb, maybe thicker. Driving that into packed earth with one hand was going to be brutal work.
Then he looked at Lucien's neutral expression and something in his pride caught fire.
"Give me that." He snatched the hammer from Lucien's hand, grabbed the rebar with his good one, and set the point against the ground with more force than was strictly necessary. "Move. You're in my way."
The first strike rang out like a gunshot. Then the second. Then the third.
Merle attacked that rebar like it had personally offended him, driving it into the ground. Sweat beaded on his forehead. A stream of curses poured out of his mouth with every impact.
Glenn, who was up on the sign post rigging the sheet into place, paused to watch.
T-Dog just shook his head slowly. "I'll be damned."
Daryl, who had been working on the second anchor post, glanced over at Merle's furious display, then at Lucien, who was standing nearby with his hands in his pockets, watching Merle work.
Something shifted behind his eyes.
He didn't say anything. He just turned back to his own work, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
---
It took maybe ten minutes, all told.
Glenn finished lashing the bedsheet to the sign post just as the sun dipped below the treeline. The white sheet caught the breeze and snapped open.
WARNING! ATLANTA HAS FALLEN! LARGE NUMBERS OF WALKERS INSIDE THE CITY!
He even grabbed the last of the spray paint and knelt down on the asphalt, reproducing the message directly onto the road surface. Anyone driving through here couldn't miss it. Not the sheet overhead, not the words painted on the ground beneath their tires.
Merle dropped the hammer and slumped against the truck. He flexed his good hand and muttered something under his breath that was probably a curse but came out too quiet to catch.
T-Dog leaned against the front bumper, arms loose at his sides, watching the sheet flutter in the wind. He didn't say anything, but his expression was the closest thing to peaceful Lucien had seen on him since they'd met.
The sun sank lower. The golden light stretched across the dead city's edge.
Lucien squinted against it and raised a hand to shield his eyes.
Rick noticed. He watched the kid for a second and without really thinking about it, reached up and pulled off his own sheriff's hat.
He set it on Lucien's head.
It was too big. It sat crooked, sliding down over one ear. Lucien blinked up at him from under the brim, looking confused for once.
Rick just smiled.
They stood like that for a few minutes. No one spoke. The wind stirred the sheet. The sun slipped fully below the horizon.
Then Lucien patted Rick's arm.
"Let's go."
Rick nodded. The truck rumbled back to life. It pulled back onto the road, kicking up a trail of dust, and headed steadily toward the camp.