TWD - Chapter 584: The Final Sweep of the East District (Patreon)

By the morning of the fourth day, all eight main clearing teams and the mobile support unit had assembled at UTK Stadium. More than nine hundred people filled the stands and field.

"That should do it," Benson murmured.

Theodore turned to him. "Should do what?"

"Everyone's back. Time to finish up."

Almost on cue, Leah's voice crackled over the teams' radios. "All units, begin the final sweep. Bossie, launch the drones."

"Copy."

Several drones lifted from the edge of the stadium and buzzed beyond the campus. Loaded with walker attractants, they would spray the entire East District, from east to west and south to north, drawing out any stragglers still hidden among the ruins.

The Defense Force immediately split into groups, each following a drone to finish clearing its assigned area.

Bossie guided a drone over the district while watching its terrain map. Several red markers crept across his screen, each representing a wandering walker.

He pressed a control. The hatch opened and released a fine cloud of walker attractant. Living people couldn't smell it, but to walkers, it was as unmistakable as a dinner bell.

On the screen, the red dots began drifting toward one another.

"Thirty-seven on the east side, moving toward the hospital," Bossie reported.

"We've got them," Carver answered.

...

From the narrowest alleys and darkest corners of ruined buildings, walkers emerged in groups. Their rotten feet scraped the streets, their decayed heads lolling as they followed the drones. Defense Force soldiers were waiting to cut them down.

The drones swept East Knoxville for the entire morning. By the time they finished, the district had finally been cleared.

Downtown lay only two blocks beyond UTK. To avoid drawing fresh hordes from the city center into their newly secured territory, Bossie sent a separate drone toward downtown and the West District, pulling walkers away from the eastern boundary.

At three that afternoon, the first civilian cleanup crews arrived from the industrial park.

A long convoy of trucks rolled straight onto campus, carrying hundreds of men and women. These weren't soldiers. They had handcarts and every sort of tool, ready to put the battered district back in order.

Benson watched from the stadium entrance, speechless. "What... what is all this?"

Theodore stared too. "There are so many of them."

After instructing the crew leaders to divide up the work, Calista approached the two men with an amused lift of her eyebrow. "What? Never seen people alive and working?"

Benson recovered enough to ask, "There must be hundreds here."

"Five hundred. And that's only the first group. More will follow."

Calista gestured toward the walker corpses scattered across the campus. "Those bodies need moving. The buildings need clearing, the rubble needs sorting, and anything we can salvage has to be collected. We'll take the corpses and trash back to the industrial park to burn."

She looked directly at Benson. "Did you think taking a district meant the work was done? The difficult part is only starting. Once the campus is clean, we still have the rest of East Knoxville to deal with."

Benson had no answer. He watched the newcomers spread out among the ruins.

Some dragged bodies away. Others collected trash, sawed through fallen timber or nailed boards over damaged structures.

It was loud, messy and chaotic, but nothing like the disorder of a battlefield. This was the bustle of reconstruction, the noise made by people who were alive.

***

By the time Deanna stepped out of her car, dusk had settled over the outline of the UTK campus.

She set off across the grounds and continued east on foot. She wanted to see for herself what the city destined to become their new center truly looked like.

Everywhere she went, something caught her attention.

Several Defense Force members worked saws through a fallen tree that blocked an entire road. Sweat ran down their temples and soaked their collars, yet not one of them complained.

Near a dormitory entrance, Aaron was speaking quietly with an engineer. He held a rolled set of plans while the engineer pointed out a long crack in the wall. Both men gestured as they discussed the damage.

Deanna approached without interrupting and heard Aaron say, "Mark that crack and send a report to the Construction Department."

"Will do. I'll bring a crew tomorrow," the engineer replied.

She waited nearby until Aaron turned and noticed her. He looked surprised. "Deanna? What brings you here?"

"Just wanted to see how things were coming along." She glanced up at the building. "How bad is it?"

"The main structure's sound. Every window's broken, and there are a few cracks in the walls, but we can make it usable again with some repairs."

"Then do it properly," Deanna said with a nod, before continuing down the path.

Aaron and the engineer exchanged a glance. Just then Eric emerged from the building, having finished his own work, and the three resumed their discussion.

Deanna crossed an open area littered with debris.

It had once been the plaza outside UTK's student activity center. Now broken glass, rotting wood, ruined furniture and heaps of refuse covered the ground.

Dozens of workers were separating anything worth keeping from the material that had to be discarded.

She recognized several faces among them. People who had come from Alexandria were working just as hard as everyone else, with no sign of slacking.

She also spotted the elderly man who had once argued with Alexandrians over warehouse shelving. Now he was crouched beside one of those very residents, the two collecting broken glass together.

The old man moved slowly but with painstaking care, feeling each shard for sharp edges before placing it in a bag.

Deanna squatted beside him. "Gathering glass?"

He looked up, recognized her and visibly stiffened. "M-Ms. Deanna?"

"Yes," he said quickly, nodding at the pieces in his hands. "We can't just throw these away. If we take them back to the workshop, they can melt the glass and use it again."

A faint smile touched Deanna's lips. "That's good."

She rose and walked on. For a long while, the man remained where he was, watching her go.

A fellow worker leaned over. "Who was that?"

"She used to run Alexandria. Now she's in charge of the Department of Civil Affairs."

The worker looked taken aback. "Someone that important came out here?"

The old man considered it. "Probably wanted to see how we're doing," he said softly.

Near the stadium, a group of young Defense Force soldiers were hauling away walker remains.

They tied ropes around the bodies, dragged them into piles and prepared them for transport. Some corpses had begun to rot, leaking foul black fluid, but no one covered their nose, drew back or protested.

Deanna scanned the soldiers, then stopped cold.

There was Aiden. Her younger son, Aiden Monroe.

The dark gray uniform seemed almost too severe on his young frame. Black blood stained his cuffs and flecked his face.

He bent to grasp a walker's leg, then pulled the corpse toward the heap, dragging it a little farther with each step.

Deanna stood still as memories from a few months earlier flooded back.

In Alexandria, Aiden had been the confident leader of the community militia, arrogant and naive enough to believe he could negotiate with Calista as an equal.

When the Wolves attacked at night, he led his militia out, only to come stumbling back. He hadn't protected Alexandria's residents. He had managed to save only his own family.

Afterward, his eyes had held little besides fear and a guilt he couldn't shake.

Now he worked in the ruins, hauling corpses with his own hands. Blood smeared his uniform, but he neither retreated nor passed the work to someone else.

Something tightened in Deanna's throat, and her eyes began to sting. She didn't call his name. She simply watched him drag the body to the heap, stack it with help from his teammates and return for another.

Only after a long while did she turn and carry on.

She passed the student dormitories, the dining hall, the classroom buildings and the library. Busy figures filled every part of the campus, clearing rubbish, fixing windows, boarding up openings and marking walls that needed repair.

Some workers were people she knew from Alexandria. Others were strangers to her, from Rock Fortress, the Reapers who had since been brought into the fold, or the survivors the Defense Force had rescued around East Knoxville in recent days.

But all of them were here now, working shoulder to shoulder to breathe life back into a city that had stood silent for a year.