The Walking Dead - 18 Miles (spoilers)

[krispos42]

13. Sure.

Rick and Shane go to bring Randall away from the farm (18 miles) and let him go. They stop and have a heart-to-heart talk, though, and Rick asserts to Shane that his wife and his son and his unborn kid are his and basically tells Shane to lay off them.

They find a county maintenance facility and decide to scavenge for food and fuel and stuff before dropping Randall there (he's bound and gagged, with an iPod taped to his ears blasting music, and a mask over his head). Rick and Shane find a couple of zombie cops wandering around inside the fenced-in facility, so they kill them with knives (quiet, saves ammo) and go inside. They leave Randall there, drop a knife on the ground, and start to walk away. Randall starts pleading for them to take him back, says he'll help them, etc., and reveals that he went to school with Maggie.

Shane and Rick realize that this means that Randall probably knows where the farm is and that all their precautions have been useless. Shane wants to kill Randall and goes to do it, but Rick grabs him, making him miss. Rick's and Shane's emotions boil over, and they engage in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Eventually, Rick wins and is walking away from Shane when Shane grabs a big pipe wrench and hurls it at Rick. It misses, but smashes through a window and a dozen or so zombies come spilling out. Rick kills the first one and hides under the corpse as the rest of the herd pours out and begins chasing after Shane. Shane retreats to a school bus and is trapped inside, holding the door closed with his body.

Randall gets the knife, cuts his legs free, and gets his bound hands up in front of him just in time to stab an attacking zombie. Rick gets up, but the tail-end charlie zombie sees him getting up and gives chase. Rick runs but trips, and tail-end charlie goes to attack him. Rick draws his revolver and shoots him in the head, and charlie falls on Rick. Two more zombies see what's going on and attack him as well. Rick shoots a second one in the head, and this one also falls on him. The third one joins the pile-up, leaving Rick pinned on the ground and unable to get his gun around to shoot the last zombie, so eventually he shoves the barrel of his revolver in charlie's mouth, wrenches his skull around, and empties the gun through charlie's skull into the last zombie's head.

Rick and Randall go to escape, stripping the gun belts from the zombie cops, but Rick has an attack of conscience and goes back to save the trapped Shane. They drive up to the back of the bus, and Shane exits through the rear door and into the car, and all three of them escape.


Meanwhile, back at the farm, Hershel's daughter (the younger blonde one... Beth?) decides she wants to commit suicide, to escape the hopelessness and horror of the post-zombie apocalypse, and had stolen a knife from her uneaten lunch. Lori goes back, retrieves the knife, and goes to find Hershel. She can't find him, but tells Maggie about what Beth wants to do, and Maggie and Beth go upstairs and have a long and vocal talk while Andrea and Lori do some domestic stuff in the kitchen. Andrea and Lori have a fight over Beth's desire to kill herself as well as Lori's assumed role of the queen of the group.

Maggie and Beth talk about Beth's death wish, which includes Beth's hope that Maggie and her will have a mutual suicide in the house. Eventually, Andrea comes up to spell Maggie's watch over Beth. Once Maggie leaves, though, Andrea basically tells Beth that it's her choice, and leaves to do what she will, that nobody but Beth could make her decision to live or die

Beth locks herself in the bathroom smashes a mirror, and slashes one of her wrists. Lori and Maggie here the commotion and her crying and force the door open. Beth is holding a towel over her slashed wrist, and Lori and Maggie take the unresisting Beth downstairs for treatment.

While Hershel is sewing Beth up, Maggie throws Andrea out of the house and tells her to never come back inside again. While Andrea is walking away, Lori tells Maggie that, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of Andrea's method, Beth did make the decision to live after all.



I'm telling this out of sequence, because the action cuts back and forth between the two story lines during the episode, but this way is how I remember it.