Chapter 5 Meeting Rick

John awakens to the sound of someone shouting weakly for a nurse, he gets out of bed and walks to the door. Bracing himself, he opens the door a couple inches and looks down the hall both ways. He can see that the hall is a complete mess, there is dried blood all over the place, and there are bullet holes at head level. Seeing as the hall is clear he walks out of the room and goes toward where he heard the shouting, as he gets closer, he hears the sound of a faucet. As he arrives in front of the room where the noise is coming from, he can see that the room has a bed with wheels in front of the door. He moves the bed out of the way and walks into the room, on the left side of the room where the bathroom is, he can see a man standing in front of the sink drinking water. The man was 5'10" and had slightly curly black hair and blue eyes.

John observes the man drinking water, after a while the man has finished drinking and notices him observing him. The man asks John, "Who are you? Where is the nurse?", John responds, "My name is John Adler and I don't know, the hospital is a mess, it seems abandoned". The man then says, "My name is Rick Grimes. What do you mean the hospital has been abandoned?", John says, "Nice to meet you, Rick. I know you are curious, but I don't have any information to give you. I just woke up when I heard you making noise. Let's go look around and see if we can find any clues." Rick nods and starts to walk out of the room, John follow beside him.

They walk together in the hall and find themselves in front of an abandoned service desk. Rick picks up the phone on the counter but there is no dial tone, he drops the phone and starts to look for anything useful. He makes a mess of the desk before finding some matches, using the light from the match he is able to look at the stuff on the desk with more visibility. He then walks to a door near the service counter, John following him, this door leads to another hallway. Looking down the hall they see a woman lying on the floor, her body seems to have been partially eaten because half of her face is missing, and her stomach is ripped open. Seeing this Rick backs away in horror, bumping into John who is looking at the corpse with a serious expression on his face.

They quickly walk away from the door down the adjacent hall. This hall was even more cluttered and there are some chairs in the hallway that have been tipped over. As they walk through the hall they can see bullet holes with blood spattering on the wall, painting a nightmarish picture. They can also see pools of blood on the floor, with blood splattering on some of the doors. Walking through a set of broken double doors, in front of them they can see another set of double doors, but these doors had the words, DON'T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE. Rick walks closer to the door, but as he does, the door begins to shake, a banging noise coming from the other side of the door. The door opens a clack allowing a pale hand to reach through, sounds of a guttural growl being heard from inside, Rick backs up with a gasp.

This causes Rick to panic as he quickly busts through a nearby door, John quickly following behind him, he saw the elevator and immediately started pressing the button, but it gave no response. Seeing that the elevator was not responding, Rick goes towards the door to the stairs. As the door closes behind them Rick and John are immediately engulfed in darkness, this darkness did not last however, as Rick lights a match and they start to walk down the stairs at a moderate pace, making sure not to fall. After using many matches, they make it to the bottom of the stairs and find themselves in front of the door to the outside. John opens the door slowly as the door make a creaking sound, with the door open John and Rick are blinded by the light for a couple seconds before their eyes begin to acclimate to the new brightness. With their eyes now well-adjusted to the light outside, they walk down a couple of steps, finally making it to the ground.

Right as they get off the last step, they see a corpse wrapped in a white sheet, looking further they see hundreds of corpses wrapped in white cloth, lined in neat rows. These corpses are not all the same size, some of them are smaller, depicting that it is not only adults among them. There are tons of flies, buzzing around the corpses, and because of shock the buzzing is deafening to the ears. Walking through the see of corpse, they walk up a small hill with bright green grass. Once up the hill, they are greeted with the sight of an abandoned military camp. Walking through the camp they pass many hummers and two helicopters.

Seeing the place abandoned Rick walks swiftly down the road, after about 10 minutes of brisk walking, they see a bike on the side of the road. Rick walks toward it and lifts it up, in the process of lifting it he made a bit of noise attracting the attention of corpse, that had no legs. It immediately started growling at Rick, shocking Rick so much that he tripped over himself as he backed away. Recovering from his shock Rick gets on the bike and starts to pedal away, the corpse starting to crawl towards John after noticing him. John seeing that Rick was a short distance away walked towards the legless corpse and stomped on its head, while saying, "I give you mercy", he wiped his foot in the grass. Then john starts to run until he had caught up to Rick, he slows to a jog next to Rick as he follows him.