How It All Goes Down
- There's a barn in the back, which Rick explores. He finds a horse. "Hello," (172) he says… to the horse. ("Hello, Wilbur," says the horse.)
- Rick rides the horse, jumping over fences and talking to the horse… a lot. Hey, you take relationships where you can find them.
- He decides to tell the horse about the "happiest day of [his] life" (184), the day his wife Lori gave birth to his son Carl. This horse must be a good listener.
- Finally, they get to Atlanta, which is a total wreck.
- Rick quickly gets surrounded by more zombies than he's ever seen. They don't have Georgia on their minds. They have brains on the brain.
- He falls off the horse, and the zombies quickly pull the horse down and eat it.
- One of them is craving human, but Rick grabs a hatchet that he took from the barn and drives it into the zombie's skull.
- A hatchet isn't going to do the job on all of them, so he pulls out his gun and starts shooting.
- He runs away, and gets pulled into an alley by a guy, a live guy, in a baseball cap.
- Ballcap says he can get Rick out of town, and Rick follows him onto the rooftops.
- They get to another fire escape, and Ballcap tells him to be ready to run. "One bite and it's all over for you" (241).
- They make it into the woods without incident, and Rick tells Ballcap that he'd been in a coma for a month. He'd never seen that many zombies.
- Ballcap says there are hundreds of them. Crowding in the cities turned out to be a Very Bad Idea.
- Rick cries because he assumes his wife and son are dead.
- Ballcap tries to cheer him up. "I've seen all kinds of people that have survived some crazy shit" (257). Plus, there's someone in the camp they're headed to that made it out of Atlanta.