‘The Walking Dead’ 905 Opening Minutes Reveals Rick’s Escape

The opening minutes of The Walking Dead 905, released as an exclusive preview available to AMC Premiere customers, reveals how Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) escapes the cliffhanger ending that left him impaled on a protruding piece of rebar. A shortened version of the preview, above, debuted on Talking Dead.

Rick, bleeding out from the wound to his left side midsection, finds himself in the hospital room where he first woke up from a coma in a world gone bye. A massive flock of birds swarm outside the window.

"Wake up, it's time to go," the bearded and wounded Rick says. "Wake up."

He looks down at his past self, bedridden and helpless, patched up following his near-death by way of a side-piercing bullet fired by a criminal.

The Rick of now looks at the cityscape outside. What first appeared to be birds has since transformed into a flock of dozens of helicopters, their buzzing and rotating blades growing louder and louder as they fly towards and then above Rick's hospital room.

"What is your wound?" asks the disembodied voice of Morgan (Lennie James). Rick flashes back to his earliest days in the wake of the apocalypse, when he was first taken in by Morgan Jones and son, before he embarked on his one-man-mission to reconnect with his own missing wife and child.

Rick looks down. His hand covers the gaping and bloody mess of a wound.

He lifts his blood-soaked hand in front of his face. "Wake up."

The other Rick, now conscious, smiles from his hospital bed. "Yeah," he says, "wake up, a—hole."

Rick stirs awake. He quickly becomes aware of his situation: he's impaled, he's alone, and a hulking herd of walkers is drawing perilously closer with each labored breathe.

Unable to pry himself from the metal rod embedded in his side, Rick quickly undoes his belt. He swings it upward, latching onto another sticking-out piece of metal, screaming in horrific pain as he hoists himself up.

Freed, Rick scrambles for the spooked white horse nearby. He throws himself on its back, barely conscious as he rides away, the seemingly endless stream of walkers behind him following in relentless pursuit of their prey.

Rick's wound forces him to hallucinate and trip through time, stirring ghosts from the past as former partner Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal) returns from beyond the grave. Other fallen survivors, including Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Hershel (Scott Wilson), have already been confirmed to help send off Lincoln in his final episode of the series.