NZ

Daryl Dixon

He’s My Man

Eventual Daryl Dixon x Reader - Slow burn 😏

Season 1

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5

Season 2

TBD

Season 3

TBD

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

Season One

TBD

Shane Walsh

The Good Guy

I think most of us can agree, Shane wasn't obsessed with Lori, he was obsessed with Rick and what better way to explore that theory than be in his mind.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Negan Smith

Mistakes We’ve Made

Everyone surged forward at once, shoes scrambling over the threshold, and we bolted straight into the light before it could close on us again.

My shoes squeaked hard against the polished floor as I skidded to a halt.

A man stood a few feet ahead of us, lab coat hanging loose off his shoulders, a shotgun raised and leveled straight at Rick’s chest.

Rick’s hands shot up slow, palms out. The rest of us froze behind him, nobody daring to breathe too loud.

“Anybody infected?” the doctor called out, steady, despite the gun still trained on us.

Rick shook his head, lowering his hands slightly. “One of our men was. He didn’t make it.”

The doctor’s eyes moved over the group, slow, careful, cataloguing every face one by one. When they landed on me, they lingered a beat too long, before he finally dropped the shotgun toward the floor.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Rick let out a long breath, exhausted and desperate. “A chance.”

….

Jenner led us to the elevator.

Stainless steel walls reflected tired faces back at us under bright white lights. It’s a miracle all this technology was still working. The elevator hummed faintly, a sound I hadn’t realized I’d missed until now.

“The elevator’s slower than I’d like,” he said, watching the numbers climb. “Backup systems don’t appreciate this many passengers.”

Carol stood in the corner with one hand pressed over her mouth, her skin gone pale beneath the fluorescent lights.

“Are you claustrophobic?” Dr. Jenner asked carol. He rested a shoulder against the wall near the control panel, comfortable as could be.

“A little,” she replied, sheepishly.

He shrugged. “Try not to think about it.”

Carol pulled Sophia closer, an insulted look spreading on her face.

“I’m sorry. You’re the first people I’ve spoken to face to face in a long time.” He glanced toward the doors before adding, almost as an afterthought, “I’ve forgotten my manners.”

The elevator doors opened just in time to save him from any backtalk.

He explained as we walked that staying meant agreeing to blood tests, no exceptions, and nobody argued.

None of us had the strength left to.

He brought us into a break room lined with vending machines and long tables, an ordinary space that felt almost obscene after everything outside.

One by one, we rolled up our sleeves and let him work, needle after needle, vial after vial.

By the time he got to me, I had my sleeve rolled up and watched the needle slide in without flinching, that little pinch and pull as the vial filled dark red, and I held steady even when Jenner glanced up like he expected me to look away.

I didn’t.

Something in me needed to watch it happen, needed to see the proof that I was still just blood and nothing more, not yet anyway.

“There you go,” he said, taping a cotton ball down over the crook of my arm. “Hold pressure a minute.”

I pressed my fingers against it and slid off the table to make room for Andrea to take my place, rolling her sleeve up with a tired motion.

“What’s the point?” she asked, watching him snap on a fresh pair of gloves. “If we were infected, we’d all be running a fever.”

“I’ve already broken every rule in the book letting you in here,” Jenner said, not looking up from the syringe. “Let me at least be thorough.”

The needle clicked into place, and Andrea barely reacted, staring off at some point on the far wall while the vial filled. “All done,” Jenner said, withdrawing it, taping her arm the same way he had mine.

“Ooh,” Andrea murmured as she pushed off the table to stand, her knees buckled, color draining fast from her face. Jacqui caught her before she hit the floor, arms wrapping tight around her.

“Are you okay?” Jacqui asked, worry evident in her voice.

“Mmm,” Andrea managed, blinking slow, disoriented.

“She hasn’t eaten much in days.” Jacqui glanced up at Jenner. “None of us really have.”

Jenner’s mouth pressed into a thin line and he peeled his gloves off with a sigh that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than just tonight.

“Follow me,” he said, already moving.

He sped over to a small lunchroom gesturing to the table. Jenner set a massive pot of water on the stove before disappearing into a back pantry, emerging with boxes of pasta that made more than one person’s eyes go wide.

We settled into mismatched chairs allowing pointless conversation to start up in fits.

Glenn asked Dale if RVs always smelled like earwax.

Carl asked Lori if he could have two helpings, and she told him they’d see.

When the pasta was close to done, I got up and wandered over to where Jenner stood at the stove, stirring slowly.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

He glanced at me, eyes tracking down and back up once, he gestured toward a stack of bowls. “Grab those.”

I started pulling bowls down, stacking them along the counter within his reach. “How long you been down here alone?” I asked, keeping my tone easy, casual.

He was quiet a second too long before answering. “Long enough.”

I waited for more. It didn’t come.

“How about you?” he asked after a moment, not quite looking at me. “How long you been alone?”

“My whole life,” I said, and I meant it more ways than he probably realized.

He nodded, and I nodded back, neither of us said anything else about it.

We started ladling pasta into bowls side by side, passing them down the table into waiting hands, I scooped a little extra in for Carl and for a few minutes the room filled with something almost like normal.

The bottle of wine made its way around the table, dark red and already half gone by the time it reached me. I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

Before I could even pass it along, Jenner was already setting a different bottle down at my elbow, pale gold and sweating cold with condensation.

“Moscato,” he said, like it was obvious. “Figured you for a sweeter palate.”

I glanced up at him, surprised. “Thank you,” I said, pouring myself a generous glass while he moved on down the table with the red.

The room was like camp all over again, quickly settling after a few glasses, forks clinking against bowls, wine glasses clunking down on the table. Glenn was already refilling Dale’s glass without being asked.

Carl had pasta sauce smeared near his mouth and Lori just laughed and wiped it away instead of scolding him.

“You know,” Dale said, swirling his glass, “in Italy, children have a little bit of wine with dinner. And in France.”

“Well,” Lori said, arching a brow at him, “when Carl is in Italy or France, he can have some then.”

“What’s it gonna hurt?” Rick said, grinning wide in a way I hadn’t seen on him in far too long. “Come on. Come on.”

Dale laughed, already reaching for a clean glass, pouring a splash no deeper than half an inch.

“What?” Carl asked, eyes darting around the table as everyone watched him with poorly hidden grins.

Dale slid the glass across to him with a flourish. “There you are, young lad.”

The table went quiet with anticipation, everyone leaning in just slightly as Carl took a cautious sip.

“Eww,” he said, face scrunching up, and the whole table erupted into laughter, loud and unguarded.

“That’s my boy.” Lori laughed, reaching over and pouring the rest of his wine straight into her own glass. “That’s my boy. Good boy.”

“Yuck.” Carl was still grimacing. “That tastes nasty.”

“Well, just stick to soda pop there, bud,” Shane said, grinning around his own glass.

Daryl pointed his fork across the table at Glenn, something mischievous flickering in his eyes. “Not you, Glenn.”

Glenn looked up mid bite, startled. “What?”

“Keep drinking, little man,” Daryl said, smirking. “I wanna see how red your face can get.”

The men broke into laughter, deep and rolling, and Glenn groaned but reached for his glass anyway, resigned to whatever was coming.

I laughed too, feeling the warmth of the wine loosen my chest that had been wound up since Fort Valley, since Atlanta, since Amy.

I don’t remember the last time I had wine this good.

A couple seats over, Shane’s easy grin had gone loose and slippery, and I watched his eyes drift lazy around the circle before landing hard on Jenner, something calculating sliding in underneath all that warmth.

“So when are you gonna tell us what the hell happened here, Doc?” he asked, tilting his glass toward him. “All the other doctors that were supposed to be figuring out what happened. Where are they?”

The table’s laughter dried up fast, a hush settling in where the warmth had been just seconds before.

“We’re celebrating, Shane.” Rick’s voice came with a warning under the words. “Don’t need to do this now.”

“Whoa, wait a second.”

Shane set his glass down harder than he needed to.

“This is why we’re here, right? This was your move, supposed to find all the answers.” He laughed, short and humorless. “Instead we, we found him. Found one man. Why?”

Jenner didn’t flinch, just turned his own glass slow between his fingers, watching the wine catch the light. “When things got bad, a lot of people just left. Went off to be with their families. And when things got worse, when the military cordon got overrun, the rest bolted.”

“Every last one?” Shane pressed.

“No.” Something tightened around Jenner’s eyes. “Many couldn’t face walking out the door. They opted out.” He paused, and the silence that followed felt heavier than anything said so far. “There was a rash of suicides. That was a bad time.”

I felt the warmth drain right out of my chest, I caught Glenn’s hand go still around his fork across the table.

“You didn’t leave,” Andrea said quietly, watching Jenner close. “Why?”

“I just kept working,” he said, simple, like it explained everything and nothing at once. “Hoping to do some good.”

Glenn leaned toward Shane, shaking his head, some of the tension breaking loose in his voice. “Dude, you are such a buzzkill, man.”

A few nervous laughs rippled around the table at that, but they were thin now, brittle, everyone’s eyes flicking between Shane and Jenner like they were waiting to see which one cracked first.

I took a slow sip of my wine, the sweetness gone sour on my tongue.

….

We cleared the table in a shuffle, plates stacking up in the sink, forks clattering soft against ceramic. I gathered up a few empty bowls and carried them over, running water hot enough to fog the air a little as I started scrubbing at the dried sauce.

“I’ll get those later.” Jenner appeared at my elbow, gently nudging me off with a small, tired smile. “But thank you.”

I dried my hands on my jeans and stepped back, letting him shut off the tap while the rest funneled out into the hallway together, bodies squeezing against each other in the narrow space.

Someone’s elbow caught my ribs.

“Most of the facility is powered down, including housing,” Jenner said, leading us along, “so you’ll have to make do here. The couches are comfortable, but there are cots in storage if you’d like. There’s a rec room down the hall the kids might enjoy. Just don’t plug in the video games, okay? Or anything that draws power. Same goes for showers. If you shower, go easy on the hot water.”

“Hot water?” Glenn repeated, like the words didn’t quite compute.

“That’s what the man said,” T-Dog said, grinning, and the two of them laughed like they’d been handed something too good to be real.

….

I peeled off from the group and found a room toward the end of the hall and dropped my bag onto the couch with a heavy thud.

The haze sat warm and thick behind my eyes, the hallway tilting just slightly if I turned my head too fast. I dug through my bag, past tampons and crumpled papers and a folded photograph I didn’t let myself look at right now, until my fingers closed around a bar of honey soap tucked in the bottom, one of the last things I’d managed to scavenge weeks ago.

Through the doorway I caught sight of Andrea and Dale slipping into a room further down, towels draped over their shoulders.

She looks relieved.

I grabbed my own towel and stumbled for the showers, my shoulder catching the doorframe on the way through, and the second I stepped under the spray, hot water hit my skin like something out of a dream.

My face already felt so flushed from the wine and the heat of the water on top of it made my head swim worse, the whole room started tilting around me.

I looked down and watched the water pooling at my feet run brown, then pink, then red, days of dirt and blood rinsed off me and disappearing down the drain.

I tipped my head back and let the stream soak through my hair, submerging myself under it fully, eyes closed, water roaring soft in my ears and drowning out everything else for just a minute.

Amy.

I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

I let it pass through me instead of fighting it. Now is too soon to think about stuff I can’t change.

Nikki.

My sister’s name came next. I pressed my palm flat against the tile to steady myself. Two sisters, just gone. Never coming back. I held my head between my hands.

Daryl.

That one lingered longer than the rest, warm in a different way entirely, and I let out a small huff of breath.

He was so different from anyone I’d ever met before. Amy and I had talks about Shane all the time. Men like him went after nurses and left you before you could even blink.

Daryl didn’t seem like the type at all. He was different.

No. Not right now.

I reached for the knob and twisted the water off.

….

I pulled on a baggy shirt and some sweats after my shower, fingers still pruned from the water. Cool droplets dripped down the back of my neck as I made my way down the hall toward the rec room.

I found my way to the small library nook tucked off to the side, shelves lined with books that looked barely touched, their spines still stiff. Lori and Carl were already there, pulling a couple paperbacks down together, murmuring quiet about which ones looked good.

“We’re gonna go say a prayer before bed.” Lori glanced my way with a small, tired smile. “Been a while since we had a quiet place to do it right.”

“Night, you two,” I said, and Carl gave me a small wave before they headed off down the hall, books tucked against his chest like something precious.

Shane lingered near the doorway a moment longer, watching them go. He cleared his throat and pushed off the frame. “Gonna turn in too,” he muttered, swishing a dark bottle of liquor in one hand.

He disappeared down the opposite hall before anyone could say much back. I watched him go figuring I must’ve missed something from dinner. I ran my fingers along the spines, wine glass balanced in my other hand, not really looking for anything in particular, just needing my hands busy while my mind settled.

“Find anything good?” Jenner’s voice came from behind me, and I glanced back to find him leaning in the doorway, own glass of red still in hand, tie long since discarded, top button of his shirt undone.

“Haven’t decided yet.” I pulled a paperback halfway out, read the spine, slid it back in. “Nothing that survived the end of the world feels like light reading.”

He huffed and stepped further into the room, gaze drifting slow over the shelves. “Most of these were mine,” he said. “Or the people who used to work here. Left in a hurry. Books were the last thing on anyone’s mind.”

“Guess that’s fair.” I took a slow sip of my wine, watching him over the rim of the glass. “You read much? Down here, I mean. Alone.”

“Less than I’d like to admit.”

I nodded slow, not pushing further, and turned back to the shelf.

“I should check on the others,” Jenner said after a while, setting his empty glass down on a side table. “Get some rest if you can.”

“Thanks for tonight,” I said.

He gave a small nod and slipped out, his footsteps fading soft down the hall until the room went quiet around me.

I kept scanning the shelf until they caught on something wedged sideways between two hardbacks, a slim book with a worn fabric cover. I pulled it free and flipped it open, and a few loose papers slid loose from where they’d been folded inside, drifting down onto the carpet.

It was a diary. A woman’s handwriting curled across the first few pages, soft and looping, though most of what followed had been torn out, jagged strips still clinging to the binding where whole entries used to sit.

I crouched down and gathered up the fallen papers, unfolding one enough to see it wasn’t part of the diary at all.

I closed it gently and tucked it into the waistband of my sweats, deciding that it was coming with me.

….

The smell of eggs and coffee pulled me down the hall before I was even fully awake.

“Hello.” Rick shuffled in behind me, looking rough around the edges, hair every direction, eyes squinted against the fluorescent lights.

“Morning,” Dale said, far too chipper for the room’s collective mood.

“Are you hung over?” Carl asked, peering up at his dad with open curiosity. “Mom said you’d be.”

“Mom is right,” Rick admitted, dropping into a chair like it cost him something.

“Mom has that annoying habit,” Lori said, sliding a mug of coffee toward him without being asked.

“Eggs.” T-Dog set a heaping plate in the middle of the table. “Powdered, but I do ’em good.”

Glenn groaned from where he was slumped over his own plate, forehead nearly touching the table, and I had to bite back a grin at the sight of him.

“I bet you can’t tell,” T-Dog said, clearly enjoying himself, dishing eggs onto Glenn’s plate anyway despite the protest.

Dale laughed, watching Glenn’s misery with open delight, and Jacqui rubbed slow circles on Glenn’s shoulders, murmuring something sympathetic that didn’t stop T-Dog’s teasing one bit.

“Protein helps the hangover,” T-Dog said, setting the spoon down with a satisfied clink.

Glenn just moaned in response, burying his face further into his arms.

“Don’t ever, ever, ever let me drink again,” Glenn muttered into his arms.

“Hey.” Shane shuffled in, looking about as rough as Rick.

“Hey,” Rick said. “Feel as bad as I do?”

Shane made a beeline for the coffee pot, pouring himself a cup with the careful precision. “Worse,” he muttered.

I was the only one at the table who didn’t look like death warmed over, and I knew it showed in the easy way I was eating, humming under my breath.

I nudged Glenn’s shoulder gently and he groaned in warning without even lifting his head.

“Lightweight,” I teased, grinning down at him.

“I heard that,” he mumbled.

“You were meant to.”

Jacqui swatted lightly at my arm, though there was a smile tugging at her mouth too.

“Morning.”

Jenner stepped into the kitchen doorway, looking a little more put together than most of us had managed today.

“Hey, Doc.” Shane lifted his coffee mug in a lazy half salute.

Murmured greetings rippled around the table, mouths still full of eggs, and Jenner nodded at all of it with the air of a man who was still adjusting to having company.

“I don’t mean to slam you with questions first thing,” Dale said, setting his fork down.

“But you will anyway,” Jenner finished for him, a faint, knowing smile tugging at his mouth.

“We didn’t come here for the eggs,” Andrea said, and though her tone stayed light, there was real weight underneath it. “You said you were studying this. I want to know what you’ve learned.”

“I learned plenty,” he said, rubbing a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “None of it helped.”

Dale shifted his hat between his hands. “Can you show us?”

Jenner set his cup down and gestured for us to follow, leading the whole group out of the kitchen and down the hall into a large open room.

I trailed near the back, curiosity prickling under my skin despite the ache still lingering in my shoulder from days of hauling gear.

The hum of ventilation followed us from room to room, mixing with the steady buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. Every laboratory we passed looked like someone had stood up in the middle of the workday and never come back.

Jenner stopped in front of a workstation surrounded by several monitors. He rested one hand on the console without waking it.

“This is where we reviewed neurological recordings.” He rested a hand against the console but didn’t turn it on right away. “I’ve watched this more times than I can count.”

“This is where we reviewed neurological recordings,” he said quietly. “I’ve watched these files more times than I can count. Every time I sat down, I convinced myself I’d notice something I’d missed before.”

His thumb hovered over a key.

“I never did.”

The monitors flickered to life.

A human brain slowly rotated across the largest screen, strands of blue and gold light weaving through it like tiny bolts of lightning beneath glass.

Carl stepped closer, tilting his head.

“It looks… pretty.”

Jenner followed his gaze to the screen. “It is.”

The lights continued dancing through the image, branching in every direction before disappearing and beginning again.

“That’s a healthy brain,” Jenner said. “Every one of those flashes is activity. Every memory you’ve ever made, every voice you’ve ever heard, every face you’ve ever loved. Every fear, every dream. It’s all happening in there, all at once.”

I found myself staring at the screen, watching the lights race through the image in impossible patterns. For a moment it was almost beautiful enough to forget why we were standing there.

Jenner reached for the keyboard again.

“Now watch.”

The recording changed.

At first nothing looked different. The same bright currents surged through the brain, tracing familiar paths.

Then one section dimmed.

Another followed.

The flashes slowed, stumbling where they’d once flowed effortlessly.

A bright ribbon near the center flickered once.

Then disappeared.

Jenner kept his eyes fixed on the monitor.

“We watched this happen over and over,” he said quietly. “Every patient. Every recording. It always ended the same way.”

Andrea’s voice barely rose above a whisper.

“Can you stop it?”

Jenner answered before she’d even finished asking.

“We couldn’t.”

Rick stepped forward, his eyes still locked on the dying lights.

“But you tried.”

A tired laugh escaped Jenner.

“You have no idea.” He rested both hands against the edge of the console. “Every morning I’d walk in convinced I’d missed something obvious. Some tiny detail buried in thousands of hours of data. I’d spend the entire day chasing it…” He shook his head. “Every night I’d leave carrying the same questions I walked in with.”

Dale broke the uncomfortable silence.

“So nobody figured it out?”

Jenner took a slow breath.

“Everybody was trying. We shared research, argued over theories, compared anything we could get our hands on. Every country that still had scientists was looking for the same answer.”

He looked through the glass into the empty laboratory beyond.

“The French thought they were close once.”

For just a heartbeat, hope stirred around the room.

Jenner noticed.

“They stopped answering.”

….

A few minutes had passed and they were anything but silent.

The monitor continued its slow rotation behind us, the dying lights frozen beneath the glass while the quiet hum of machinery filled the room.

“So that’s it?” Morales looked between Jenner and Rick. “We drove all this way for nothing?”

Rick brushed him off, more defeated than angry. “Nobody knew what we’d find.”

“But you thought there’d be something,” Shane cut in, folding his arms across his chest. “A cure. A vaccine. Hell, some kind of plan.”

“I hoped there would be.”

“Hoped.” Shane gave a short, bitter laugh. “That’s what got us here.”

Lori stepped beside Rick before he could answer.

“And where else were we supposed to go?” she snapped. “Fort Benning? We didn’t even know if it was still standing.”

Morales shook his head.

“I’m not saying we should’ve gone somewhere else. I’m saying we kept telling our kids we were coming here because these people would know what to do.”

His daughter reached for his hand, and he squeezed it without looking away from Rick.

“They don’t.”

“No,” Jenner answered before Rick could. “We didn’t.”

Daryl pushed himself off the wall with an irritated grunt.

“Well,” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his face, “I need another damn drink.”

A few tired chuckles escaped the group, but they disappeared almost as quickly as they’d come.

“Dr. Jenner,” Dale approached carefully from behind everyone. “I know this has been taxing for you, and I hate to ask one more question, but.”

He pointed toward the red numbers glowing on the wall. “That clock. It’s counting down. What happens at zero?”

“The basement generators,” Jenner said, voice gone hollow. “They run out of fuel.”

“And then?” Rick asked.

Jenner didn’t answer.

“VI,” Rick said, turning toward the console. “What happens when the power runs out?”

“When the power runs out,” the voice answered, “facility wide decontamination will occur.”

“What’s that mean?”

The men bolted toward the hallway. Rick, Shane, Glenn, all of them peeling off toward the stairwell in a scramble of boots on concrete.

Carol wrapped both arms around herself. “But we’re safe here… aren’t we? If they find the fuel.”

Every eye drifted toward Jenner.

He just turned and walked out of the room, leaving all of us standing there in the wake of his silence.

….

The others drifted back to their rooms in twos and threes, nobody saying much of anything. What was there to say with everything we just learned.

There is nothing and no one out there.

I dropped onto the edge of the couch and started folding yesterday’s clothes into uneven squares, more to keep my hands busy than because I cared how they looked.

This room was stuffier than i remembered.

At first I couldn’t figure out why.

Then I realized it was warmer, only a little but enough that a bead of sweat slid down the back of my neck.

I looked toward the ceiling vent.

The steady rush of cool air I’d barely noticed since we’d arrived had disappeared.

The hallway beyond my door looked dimmer. One by one, they blinked out down the corridor.

A door slammed open somewhere nearby.

I stepped into the hall just as Jenner hurried past, no coffee in his hand this time, no slow measured walk. He moved with purpose, disappearing toward the main atrium without so much as looking at any of us.

Doors opened all around me.

Lori and Carl.

Sophia and Carol.

Andrea and Dale.

People spilled into the hallway throwing questions at Jenner.

I turned back into the room and started throwing everything into my duffel. Shirts. Books. My knife. It didn’t matter where anything landed.

What little survival instincts I had told me to grab food and water. The clock was already ticking and we didn’t have time to waste. I went through the rooms throwing stuff back into bags their respective bags.

If it couldn’t keep us alive, it wasn’t worth carrying.

Dale and Andrea’s room was next.

I slung Andrea’s over one shoulder and reached for Dale’s without thinking. His old pocket watch rested on the arm of the couch where he’d left it the night before. I hesitated just long enough to snatch it up and shove it into the side pocket of Andrea’s bag

I hurried into the kitchen, both bags bouncing against my hips. The pantry shelves blurred together as my hands swept across them. Cans clattered into my arms without a second glance. Beans. Soup. Fruit. It didn’t matter.

Move. Move. Move.

Something shattered somewhere outside the room.

I froze.

Then another crash, louder this time, followed by boots pounding against concrete.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

I bolted into the hallway just as the others were sprinting up the ramp toward me. Rick was yelling something at me but I couldn’t make out the words.

The security door between us groaned to life.

“No…”

The heavy door between us began to slide shut, metal groaning.

“Wait!”

I ran.

The bags slammed against my sides, cans banging together so hard they bruised my legs. My lungs burned before I’d made it halfway.

“Wait!” I screamed, my voice cracking. “Wait! Wait!”

I skidded across the polished floor, nearly losing my footing before crashing into the sealed door. Everything spilled from my arms. Cans rolled in every direction, bottles burst from torn bags, crackers scattered across the floor.

I didn’t care.

Both fists slammed into the cold metal.

“Open the door!”

The impact shot pain up my arms.

“Open it! OPEN IT!”

I pressed my ear to the door, straining, and I could hear faint shouting on the other side, but I couldn’t make out words, couldn’t do anything but stand in front of the door uselessly hammering my fists raw against metal that isn’t going to move.

I turned to the door again when I finally saw the panel beside it, little glowing buttons that meant nothing to me but I mashed them anyway, palm slamming flat against every single one.

“Come on,” I growled, kicking the door hard enough to jolt pain up through my shin. “Come on, come on, open, open!”

My knees gave out before I decided to let them, and I sank down hard against the door, bags heavy and useless in my lap.

This is it. This is really it.

I’m going to die on this side of the door while everyone I care about burns on the other.

A heavy clang echoed through the hallway.

The locking bolts groaned.

The steel doors shuddered before slowly sliding apart.

Rick was through the opening before they’d finished moving.

“Let’s go!”

I didn’t waste time asking questions. I snatched the bags off the floor and shoved Glenn’s into his chest hard enough to make him stumble before tossing Shane his own.

We ran toward the entrance in a ragged mass, T Dog breaking away first, grabbing a chair and hurling it at the reinforced window with everything he’s got.

“Daryl, look out!” he yelled, swinging hard.

The chair bounced off uselessly, barely leaving a mark.

“Dog, get down! Get down!” Shane shouted, already racking his shotgun.

Shane fired, the blast deafening in the enclosed space, but the glass only spiderwebbed faintly, holding firm against everything we’ve had.

“Jesus,” Shane breathed, staring at it like it might change its mind if he glares hard enough.

“The glass won’t break?” Sophia asked, pressed hard against Carol’s side.

Carol’s dug into her bag, rummaging fast. “Rick, I have something that might help.”

“Carol, I don’t think a nail file’s gonna do it,” Shane snapped, already turning back toward the window.

But Carol pulled out something else entirely, small and dark and heavy looking, and held it toward Rick with steady hands.

“Your first morning at camp,” she continued, ignoring Shane’s comment entirely, “when I washed your uniform, I found this in your pocket.”

Rick’s face went slack with recognition as he took the grenade from her palm, turning it over once like he couldn’t quite believe it.

I watched Rick’s fingers close tight around our one last chance to get out of here alive.

Everyone scattered for cover, I ducked behind an overturned desk with Glenn, my hands shaking as I cover my head.

Rick stayed exposed a second longer than anyone else, fingers working the pin loose. He set the grenade on the window sill and didn’t waste a second more, already turning, already running.

“Oh, sh—” he started, and then he was diving away hard, throwing himself clear.

“Get down!” Daryl echoed, flattening himself against the floor.

The explosion cracked the air apart, a wall of sound and pressure that punched straight through my ears even from behind cover.

Glass shattered in a violent spray, and I flinched hard, arms thrown up over my face as debris rains down around us.

When I finally lift my head, the window nearest the blast has blown wide open, jagged edges framing a hole big enough to climb through, sunlight and fresh air pouring in past the smoke still curling off the sill.

It’s not pretty, but it’s enough. We can finally get out.

Bodies started scrambling upright, grabbing bags, grabbing each other, already pushing toward the opening before the dust even finished settling.

….

We spill out into the lot, walkers already lurching toward the noise from every direction.

Shane and Rick fire in tandem, dropping two that get too close too fast, and Daryl swung his axe, taking a walker’s head clean off with a wet thud.

Rick lead the charge toward the vehicles, panting hard, Carl and Lori right on his heels, Lori’s hand clamped tight around her son’s arm.

I broke off toward my own truck, lungs burnings again and hurl the food bag and my pack into the truck bed without slowing down, scrambling around to the driver’s side and yanking the door open so hard it nearly comes off the hinge.

My hands were shaking so bad I fumbled the key twice before it caught.

I didn’t realize I lost track of everyone in the chaos, faces blurring past in a panicked sprint toward the RV.

Who were we missing.

That’s when I caught sight of Andrea and Dale dropping down out of the shattered window behind us. They don’t run very far.

They duck low instead, pressing themselves flat behind the sandbag barricade just as a deep tremor rolls up through the ground beneath my tires.

I lay on the horn, one long desperate blast. “Wait, wait, wait!” I scream out the window, waving frantic. “Wait, wait, they’re coming!”

The CDC went up behind them in, the shockwave rattling my windows, glass and debris raining down over the barricade while Andrea and Dale huddle low against it, arms thrown over their heads.

For one horrible second I lose sight of them entirely in the smoke and falling ash.

Then they’re moving again, scrambling up from behind the sandbags, sprinting hard across the lot through a haze of drifting soot. A walker lurches into their path and Dale yanks Andrea sideways to dodge it, both of them stumbling but not slowing.

Dale angles toward the RV, one hand still gripping Andrea’s arm, but she wrenches free at the last second and sprints for my truck instead, yanking the passenger door open and throwing herself inside just as I stomp the gas.

“Go, go, go!” she gasped, slamming the door shut behind her, ash still clinging to her hair and shoulders.

I didn’t need telling twice.

Tires squeal against the pavement as I peel out, following the RV’s taillights through the chaos, and in my mirror I watch the CDC building disappear behind a rising column of black smoke, thick and violent against the pale morning sky, swallowing up everything Jenner ever hoped to protect down there in the dark.

….

Taglist

My chest heaved as I stumbled backward, my boots catching in the pine needles. For one heartbeat, everything went still.

Then Ed screamed in a desperate cry for help.

The canvas walls of his tent jerked as something slammed into them from the inside. Fabric stretched and snapped back. A walker snarled, followed by the wet sound of teeth finding flesh.

I flinched away. My stomach twisted and lurched so hard I thought I might be sick.

I did this.

My fingers curled into fists, slick with sweat.

Another scream tore through the tent before breaking into choking cries that were swallowed by growls and frantic thrashing. The whole tent shuddered against the struggle.

I couldn’t look away.

Every instinct screamed at me to unzip the flap and pull the walker off him.

It screamed at me to do something but I could see Carol’s bruised face when I closed my eyes. Heard him promising to knock her flat on the ground again. Heard him shouting for her while people were dying all around him.

No.

My pulse pounded so hard it drowned out almost everything else until gunshots cracked through the trees.

Then another followed with voices this time. Rick, Daryl, Glenn, T-dog.

My head snapped toward the sound.

How long have I been standing here?

My gaze flicked back to the tent. The canvas twitched once more before falling eerily still, broken only by the low, contented growls coming from inside.

I couldn’t be here. I turned and ran back into the woods.

Branches clawed at my sleeves as I sprinted. Roots caught under my boots, forcing me to stumble before throwing myself forward again. My lungs burned. I couldn’t tell if I was running toward the others or away from what I’d just done.

I didn’t have a second to argue which one it was since the trees finally began to thin.

Camp came into view, but it didn’t feel real.

Fire climbed higher than it had any right to, flames roaring where a walker had toppled into the pit. Thick smoke rolled across camp, turning everything into shifting shades of orange and black.

Figures darted through it like ghosts, appearing one second and disappearing the next.

Voices drifted toward me.

They all sounded far away, muffled beneath the pounding of blood in my ears. My legs kept moving because they had to.

One boot caught on a root and I pitched forward, hard ground slamming into my palms hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.

I stayed there, staring at the dirt beneath me.

Pine needles.

Ash.

Tiny flecks of blood that weren’t mine.

Footsteps hurried closer with hands grabbing me beneath the arm.

“Hey…” Glenn said.

His baseball cap was gone. Soot streaked across one side of his face, and there was a tear running through one sleeve of his shirt. His chest rose and fell in quick breaths.

His mouth was moving before the words finally reached me.

“Hey…hey, are you okay?”

I blinked stupidly at him. It took me a second to remember how to answer.

He must have misread the look on my face as fear because before I could say anything, he pulled me into a hug, arms wound tight around my shoulders, his heart still slamming hard enough that I could feel it against my own chest.

I hugged him back, my fingers curling into the back of his shirt. I didn’t correct him. I didn’t know how to explain what was actually written on my face, not yet. 

Glenn would never understand.

He was so innocent.

So good. 

Across the fire, Lori had both arms wrapped around Carl so tightly he couldn’t have pulled away if he’d wanted to.

She watched Rick leave the R.V.

For half a second she froze before she was moving. She crossed the distance almost at a run and shoved both hands into his chest hard enough to make him take a step back.

“Where the hell were you?”

Her voice cracked sharply.

“Do you have any idea—” She shoved him again. Her eyes were bright with tears she was too angry to let fall. “Do you have any idea what I thought happened to you?”

Carl reached for her. “Mom—”

“You left! Again!”

Rick opened his mouth. “Lori…”

He didn’t defend himself or make excuses. It seemed to everyone going on a dead end rescue almost cost the camp their lives.

Rick stepped forward and caught her wrists before she could shove him again. “I’m here.”

She tried to pull away.

“I’m here,” he repeated, softer this time. “I’m sorry.”

She folded into him, fists clutching the back of his shirt as the sob she’d been holding back finally escaped.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

Rick’s eyes found Shane standing a few yards away, still breathing hard, blood drying across one sleeve.

“Thank you,” Rick said quietly. “For protectin’ them.”

….

Nobody quite knew what to do with their hands once the adrenaline wore off. So we worked.

Bodies were dragged away from the tents. Weapons were gathered into piles. Blood-soaked blankets disappeared into the fire.

Anything to keep moving.

The hours slipped by unnoticed. Darkness gave way to a pale gray dawn, then slowly to the sharp greens of morning. Smoke drifted low through camp, carrying the sour smell of burned flesh and damp earth.

I grabbed a faded red bandana from the supply pile and tied it over my nose and mouth. It already smelled like sweat and old tobacco from whoever had worn it before me.

The gloves I found were too big. My fingers swam inside them.

Across camp, Andrea still sat beside Amy. She hadn’t moved an inch. One hand rested gently on Amy’s shoulder as though she were waiting for her little sister to wake up.

I stayed far away. Grief like that belonged to family. Instead, I would work.

Daryl was already there driving an axe into the skull of another walker with a dull crack before planting one boot against its shoulder and wrenching the blade free.

I picked up my own from the growing pile, the handle rough beneath my gloves. Without a word, I planted my boot against the next walker and brought the blade down.

The impact jarred my arms all the way to my shoulders.

Beside me, Daryl broke the silence. “Didn’t find Merle.”

I glanced over. His eyes stayed on the body at his feet.

“Had to hightail it back here without him.” He spat into the dirt. “Bastard stole the van. Tried leavin’ us all behind.”

He buried the axe again.

“I know he ain’t worth much…” His jaw flexed. “…still my brother.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I didn’t mean it but there was nothing else to offer him.

Daryl gave a grunt and we went back to work.

I dragged the back of my forearm across my face, smearing sweat beneath the bandana before driving the axe down again.

“Hold up.”

Daryl was already digging through a pile of supplies with one hand. He came up with an old rag and tossed it toward me.

I caught it against my chest.

“You got somethin’.”

I frowned.

He motioned vaguely toward his own cheek. “Right there.”

I wiped at it.

“Still there.”

I sighed. “Very helpful, Dixon. Thank you.”

“Little lower.” The corner of his mouth twitched.

I wiped again.

“Got it.”

I looked down at the rag. It came away streaked with dried blood and bits of gray matter. Gross.

“Thanks.”

Daryl shrugged like it wasn’t worth mentioning and lifted his axe again.

“Ain’t yours.”

Movement to the left caught my eye. Morales and T-Dog emerged from the tree line carrying the last body between them, one beneath the shoulders, the other by the ankles.

Ed.

His boots carved two crooked lines through the dirt as they dragged him into camp. My grip tightened around the axe handle.

“They got him?” someone asked.

T-Dog let the body fall with a dull thud. “Last one.” He wiped a forearm across his face before looking around the camp. “Three, maybe four walkers packed into that tent with him.”

Morales shook his head.

“Had to put ’em all down before we could even get to him.”

“Jesus…” Glenn muttered quietly.

A few people looked away, others simply stared.

Carol stepped out from between the tents with Sophia’s hand tucked into hers. Sophia looked toward the body.

Carol caught her shoulder before she could take another step. “Don’t.”

She swallowed hard without taking her eyes off Ed. “Sophia…” Her chin began to tremble. “Go on. Go sit in the RV with Carl.”

Sophia hesitated only a moment before hurrying toward the RV.

Carol waited until she disappeared inside. Then the tears came.

Daryl stepped toward the body, lifting the pickaxe onto one shoulder. “Get back.” He reached for the handle with both hands.

“Wait.”

Carol’s voice stopped him. She walked forward slowly, never taking her eyes off Ed.

“I’ll do it.”

Daryl looked at her. Then at Ed. His grip loosened on the handle.

“…He’s my husband.”

Daryl searched her face like he was making sure she understood exactly what she was asking. Then gave one small nod. He turned the pickaxe around and held the handle out to her.

She accepted it with both hands. She stepped over Ed. Tears slid silently down her cheeks.

She looked down at the man who had spent years making her afraid, making everyone afraid, then drew in one slow breath.

She swung the pickaxe with a sickening crack.

Carol wretched it free and swung again. Then again and again. Each blow landed with the same steady force.

Only when her arms finally refused to lift the pickaxe again did she let it slip from her hands. It landed in beside her with a dull thud.

I am such an asshole.

….

Nobody wanted to be the first one to say it.

We couldn’t stay.

The fresh graves rested on top of the hill, the dirt still dark where it had been turned that morning. Every now and then someone’s eyes wandered toward the tree line before quickly looking away again.

Yesterday this place had felt safe. Now it felt like a trap. The silence stretched until Shane finally broke it.

“Fort Benning.” He paced a tight line through the middle of camp, pointing south like he could see the community beyond the trees. “It’s a military base. Walls, guns, soldiers. That’s where we go.”

“It’s two hundred and fifty miles, Shane,” Rick answered. His voice was tired more than angry. “We don’t even know if it’s still standing.”

“We don’t know it’s not.”

“We don’t know a lot of things.”

Rick scrubbed both hands down his face before turning a slow circle, looking at the camp around him.

“That’s the problem.”

Dale shifted his weight, arms folded across his chest. “Somewhere colder might do us some good. Walkers slow down in the cold. Gives us an edge.”

A few people murmured under their breath.

“Maybe.” I said out loud.

“He’s got a point.”

“Cold?” Shane barked a humorless laugh. “You wanna drive to Canada on half a tank of gas? Maybe stop by Niagara Falls while we’re at it?”

“I’m offering an option,” Dale replied, his own patience starting to fray.

“Yeah, one that’ll get us killed.”

“Enough.”

Rick’s voice silenced both of them.

Andrea hugged her knees closer to her chest.

“I just think…” She stared into the dirt as she spoke. “Somewhere the dead move slower. Somewhere we’re not sweatin’ to death all summer and freezin’ all winter.”

I rubbed my thumb against the frayed edge of the bandana tied around my wrist.

I wasn’t even sure why I was speaking. Maybe because nobody else had another answer.

“What about the CDC?”

“Before everything went dark,” I said, finding my footing as I went, “the emergency broadcasts kept talking about scientists working on a cure.”

“The CDC… that’s what they do.”

Shane didn’t even hesitate.

“The CDC?” He scoffed. “You really think a handful of scientists are sittin’ in Atlanta waitin’ to save the world?”

“Well they were trying.”

“They’ve been off the air for weeks.”

“So has everything else.”

The words left my mouth before I could stop them. “If we’re dismissing the CDC because we haven’t heard from them, then we should be dismissing Fort Benning too.”

A few people exchanged glances.

“She’s got a point,” Dale said quietly.

Shane threw his hands into the air. “Jesus Christ…”

“We gotta decide something,” T-Dog muttered, rubbing a tired hand over his face. “Can’t keep standin’ here arguin’ till dark.”

Rick looked around the circle.

“Fort Benning might still be there.” He looked toward Shane. “The CDC might be empty.”

His eyes drifted toward the fresh graves.

“The truth is I don’t know what’s waiting for us anywhere.” His gaze swept across every face. “But I do know what happens if we stay.”

Shane opened his mouth, ready to fire back, when a soft thud sounded behind them.

Heads snapped around. 

Jim had gone down hard in the dirt, sprawled on his side, motionless. Everyone dropped what they were doing and closed in fast, a tight ring forming around Jim’s body sprawled in the dirt. 

Jacqui was already on her knees beside him hollering for a damp cloth. 

“He’s overheated,” Lori said, kneeling on his other side, checking his pulse at his wrist. “It’s the sun. He’s been out here too long, working himself up again.”

“Jim?” Jacqui patted his cheek gentle, urgent. “Jim, can you hear me?”

I pushed closer through the ring of legs to get a look, that’s when I saw the dark stain blooming through the side of his shirt, spreading low near his ribs. 

“Move.” 

My voice came out sharper than I meant it, already backing up, pulling at whoever’s arm I could reach. “Everybody move, now.”

“What?” Jacqui looked up, confused, still pressing her hand to his head.

“Blood.” I kept backing away, my heart slamming. “There’s blood. He’s bit!”

That seemed to work.

Bodies began scrambling back all at once. Jim’s eyes fluttered open just as the last of us cleared away. Before he could even lift his head, Daryl was on him, knees pinning him down, knife already flashing up in one hand.

“Whoa, whoa!” Jim’s hands shot up, shielding his face, voice cracking high with panic. “I’m alive! I’m okay!”

“Daryl, wait!” I grabbed his arm with both hands, hauling back with everything I had. “Wait, look at him, he’s talking, he’s fine!”

Daryl froze above him, chest heaving, knife still raised, his eyes darting over Jim’s face like he was searching for the moment it might change.

“Get off him.” Rick shouted. 

Daryl held a second longer before he finally pulled back and let Jim go, shoving up to his feet without a word.

Glenn and T-Dog moved in fast, hauling Jim up between them and started walking him toward the RV.

“Gotta get him inside,” T-Dog said, already guiding him up the steps. “Get him some water.”

The second the door shut behind them, the whole camp erupted at once.

“We can’t just let him sit in there!” Daryl rounded on the group, pointing hard toward the RV. “He’s bit! Y’all know what happens next!”

“He’s still alive, Daryl!” Dale stepped forward, his voice shaking with something between anger and heartbreak. “He’s still talking. Still breathing. That has to count for something.”

“It don’t count for nothin’ once he turns!”

“He’s sick,” Rick cut in. “A sick man. We start down that road, where do we draw the line?”

“The line’s pretty clear,” Daryl snapped. “Zero tolerance for walkers. Or them to be.”

“Would you want that?” Rick’s voice rose over both of them, silencing the circle. “If it was you? Somebody putting you down the second you got bit, while you’re still standing here, still yourself?”

Daryl didn’t even blink. “Yeah.” His jaw was tight, eyes hard as stone. “I would. I’d thank ’em for it.”

….

Voices pulled me slowly out of sleep.

At first they were nothing more than muffled shapes behind the truck windows. Then they sharpened into words as morning light poured through the windshield.

I blinked against the sun and pushed myself upright.

The camp was already moving.

Rick hauled the last duffel into the trunk of the yellow sedan before shutting it with a solid thump. Lori settled into the front seat while Carl climbed into the back beside Sophia, the two of them quieter than I’d ever seen them.

I climbed out of the truck, heading toward the green canvas tent I’d spent all yesterday avoiding.

Amy’s things were exactly where she’d left them.

Her sweatshirt still folded into a makeshift pillow. Her hairbrush sat beside an open book. A half-finished bottle of water rested where she’d set it down.

Like she’d be back any minute.

I hadn’t slept in the tent last night. I hated sleeping in the truck. But sleeping in there without her was not something I could force myself to do.

I knelt and began stuffing my things into a duffel.

Socks. A spare shirt. The little bottle of face wash I’d been stretching for weeks.

One of Dale’s books I’d borrowed and never gotten around to finishing. I tossed the bag outside.

When I looked back, Carol had quietly stepped outside the tent. She knelt beside Amy’s quilt, lifting it carefully into her lap.

Her fingers smoothed each crease before folding it into neat, practiced squares.

“He used to make me flinch y’know. Even when he wasn’t doing anything.”

She kept folding.

“Just hearing his boots outside, I’d already be scared. I got so used to livin’ like that, I forgot what it felt like not to.”

I sat back on my heels. Nothing I could say that would give her back the years he’d taken.

“I don’t know what happens now.”

I followed her gaze toward Sophia climbing into the car with Carl.

“You get to live. Without fear. Find who you really are.” I offered, picking at a loose thread hanging from the quilt.

She frowned, eyes searching mine.

“It takes a while before your body believes you’re safe.”

“…How do you know?”

A hundred memories crowded the back of my mind.

“I just do.”

She nodded slowly.

Footsteps crunched outside the tent.

Carol’s shoulders jumped. Mine did too.

“Uh…”

We both turned.

Glenn stood in the entrance holding an empty box against his hip.

“…Did I interrupt something?”

“No,” I said, wiping quickly beneath one eye. “You’re okay.”

Glenn visibly relaxed. “Oh, good.” He pointed toward the pile. “So… which one of these is coming?”

“The duffel,” I said, pointing. “And that box beside it.”

“Got it.”

He bent, hoisted the duffel over one shoulder, grabbed the box under his other arm and somehow managed to balance both.

“Anything else?”

“We’re good,” Carol said, an honest smile finally breaking through.

“You sure? I can make another trip.”

“We’re sure.”

“Cool.” He nodded enthusiastically. “Cool, cool.”

Then he caught himself.

“…I’m gonna stop saying ‘cool’ now.”

He hurried away before either of us could answer. Carol laughed again.

We could hear Daryl and T-Dog wrestling the motorcycle up a pair of planks into the bed of the red pickup.

The tires squealed against the metal before settling with a heavy thud. Daryl wiped both hands on his jeans and glanced across camp.

His eyes landed on Carol.

Then me. Seeing us smiling. He gave the smallest nod before he turned back to tightening the straps around the bike.

I stood and held out a hand.

“You ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Shane strode through camp clapping the tops of car hoods as he passed.

“Let’s move, people! Daylight’s burnin’!” He circled back toward the middle of camp. “Listen up!”

“Those of you with CBs, we’re on Channel Forty. Anybody’s got a problem, hit your horn once. That stops the whole line.”

A ripple of nods passed through the group. I climbed into my truck.

Before I could shut the door, the other one swung open. Glenn climbed into the passenger seat, buckling himself in.

“Carpool?”

I smiled at him. “Always.”

“Got any cd’s in here?”

“Driver controls the radio,” I said with a smirk.

He scratched the back of his neck. “It was worth a shot.”

The engine rumbled to life. One by one, the vehicles pulled away from the quarry. I waited my turn before easing in behind the line.

….

An hour into the drive, I’d finally given up pretending I could keep my eyes open. Glenn had offered to take the wheel before I’d even asked.

There was no point of arguing.

I leaned my head against the cool window, watching the road blur past in streaks of gray and green. Every few seconds my eyelids drifted shut before I forced them open again.

The steady hum of tires on asphalt was almost enough to lull me back to sleep until a low roar rolled through the convoy.

It grew louder in seconds.

Daryl’s motorcycle shot past us on the left, weaving around a slower car before settling near the front of the line in a streak of chrome and dust.

Without thinking, my eyes followed him until he disappeared ahead.

“Uh-huh.”

I blinked and looked over.

Glenn’s attention never left the road.

“What?”

“Nothin’.” A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“You were staring.”

“I was not. I was simply watching the motorcycle.”

“Sure you were.”

He let the silence hang for a second before adding, almost thoughtfully, “You’ve got a thing for rednecks, don’t you.”

I let out an incredulous laugh.

“I do not.”

“Motorcycle. Crossbow.” He shrugged one shoulder. “The whole broody woodsman thing.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

I turned back toward the window, hoping he wouldn’t notice the warmth creeping into my face.

Ahead, the trees began to thin. The first buildings rose above them. Concrete and glass climbed into the sky, silent against the morning light.

Atlanta.

From this distance it almost looked untouched.

Like people should’ve been walking the sidewalks. Glenn’s smile faded as he looked toward the skyline.

“You think somebody’s still there?”

I kept my eyes on the city.

“I hope so.”

Brake lights bloomed ahead of us, one after another down the line. The RV drifted toward the shoulder, a thin ribbon of gray smoke trailing behind it.

Glenn eased off the gas.

“That’s not good.”

“No kidding.”

I was already sitting up. My eyes swept the tree line out of habit. Thankfully nothing moved. That didn’t make me feel any better about stopping though.

We rolled onto the shoulder behind the rest of the convoy, gravel popping beneath the tires until Glenn brought us to a stop.

Nobody got out immediately. Everyone looked around, waiting to see if the stop had attracted anything.

Only when Rick climbed out of the RV did the rest of us begin opening our doors. I reached across the seat and pressed my pistol into Glenn’s hand.

“Hang onto this.”

He looked down at it blankly.

“What about you?”

“I’ve got this.”

I pulled Daryl’s hunting knife from beside the seat. The leather sheath had been baking in the sun, warm against my palm as I buckled it around my thigh.

“That’s a knife,” Glenn frowned.

“It is.”

“Against walkers?”

“I don’t plan on shooting myself in the leg.”

“Fair enough,” he relented.

The heat hit like opening an oven, burning rubber, hot metal, a little bit of antifreeze. Sweat gathered instantly along my hairline as I crossed toward the RV.

The Winnebago’s hood stood open. Steam hissing toward the sky in thick white bursts. Dale leaned over the engine compartment, one arm buried somewhere inside.

“I told you we’d never get far on that hose.” He grumbled, straightening up with a tired groan, wiping black grease across an already filthy pair of pants. “I said I needed the one from the cube van.”

“Can you jury-rig it?” Rick asked.

Dale gave a dry laugh.

“That’s all it’s been since Atlanta.” He shook the loose length of patched radiator hose. “It’s more duct tape than rubber at this point. And I’m outta duct tape.” He sighed.

Shane stood in the middle of the highway with binoculars pressed to his eyes.

Daryl, T-Dog, and Andrea spread out without needing to be told, rifles held low as they watched opposite sides of the road.

Shane lowered the binoculars a few inches.

“I got something.”

Everyone looked his way.

“Looks like a gas station.”

He squinted back through the lenses.

“If we’re lucky.”

“Hey, Rick, you wanna hold down the fort?” Shane was already heading for the Jeep. “I’ll drive ahead. See what I can bring back.”

“Yeah, I’ll come too.” T-Dog fell into step beside him. “Back you up.”

“I’m coming.”

The words were out before anyone could tell me otherwise. I jogged to catch up.

Shane looked me over for a second before nodding. “Yeah, alright.” He pointed toward the convoy. “Y’all keep your eyes open.”

We climbed into the Jeep, door and windowless.

It whipped against my face the entire time, stinging my eyes as the highway stretched empty ahead of us.

The gas station came into view a minute later. Shane rolled to a stop beneath a faded canopy, the pumps standing silent beneath years’ worth of dust and bird droppings.

The automatic doors stood frozen halfway open. One pane of glass was spiderwebbed with cracks, a faded poster advertising two-for-one hot dogs peeling away from the window.

Shane led the way inside. T-Dog followed. I brought up the rear.

Glass crunched beneath our boots.

“Let’s grab what we can,” Shane said, already scanning the aisles without slowing. “Gas cans first. Food. Water if there’s any left.”

T-Dog grabbed the empty gas cans without a word, already hauling them toward the counter.

I figured I’d try my luck somewhere else and peeled off toward the back office.

It was barely bigger than a closet.

A tiny desk and a dented filing cabinet. My dream job, cute.

Someone had left a coffee mug beside an open ledger, the coffee long gone, leaving only a dark ring dried into the bottom.

I couldn’t help wondering if they’d meant to come back after lunch.

I reached for the light switch out of habit.

Nothing happened.

My eyes adjusted slowly. A ring of keys hung from a nail beside the desk. I pulled them free and started flipping through them.

Bathroom. Storage. Office.

Pump.

A grin spread across my face.

I hooked the key around one finger and wandered back into the store.

“Look what I found.”

Shane looked over his shoulder and laughed. “Knew there was a reason I brought you.”

I gave the keys a little shake before tossing them to Shane. He caught them one-handed.

While they headed back outside, I wandered farther down the aisles. The shelves had already been picked over.

Who would’ve guessed.

Gold wrappers peeked out from behind a crushed box of crackers near the bottom shelf.

I frowned, reaching behind the box.

“No way,” I said, holding it up with both hands.“Jackpot.”

The bright yellow box of Twinkies looked almost ridiculous sitting in the middle of the ruined store.

….

We made it back to the caravan, gas cans and supplies loaded up, Shane barely had the truck in park before I noticed Rick had the group pulled aside, his face carved with something heavy.

“It’s what he says he wants,” Rick said.

Carol wrapped her arms around herself. “And he’s lucid?”

“He seems to be.” Rick nodded slow. “I would say yes.”

Shane crossed his arms, shaking his head. “Woah wait, we’re just gonna leave him here? We take off?” His voice cracked with something raw underneath the anger. “Man, I’m not sure I could live with that.”

“It’s not your call,” Lori said, looking between the two of them. “Either one of you.”

I felt my chest tighten. The thought of leaving him under some tree on the side of the road twisting my stomach. 

“No,” I said shaking my head.

Every head turned toward me. 

“We’re not just leaving him propped against a tree like he’s nothing. He deserves better than that.”

I turned and started walking the tree line until I spotted a house set back off the road, paint peeling, porch sagging on one side but still standing. 

I climbed the steps carefully, testing each board, and pushed the front door open. Dust hung in the air but the roof looked solid, the walls intact. It would do.

“Over here,” I called back. “This one’ll work.”

Daryl and Shane got Jim up between them, his arms slung over their shoulders, his feet dragging weak against the dirt. Glenn held the door while they carried him through, easing him down onto an old couch pushed against the far wall, dust rising up around him in a soft cloud.

Jim let his head fall back against the cushion, his eyes half closed, chest rising slow. “Thank you,” he murmured, barely above a whisper.

….

The sky bled out fast once we crossed into the city. By the time we reached the CDC building, daylight had collapsed into a deep gray dusk that washed the color out of everything.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Glenn muttered, easing the truck into park.

It didn’t. We climbed out into a silence so complete it felt heavy. The plaza stretched wide in front of the building.

Bodies lay everywhere. Some slumped against concrete barricades. Some crumpled where they’d fallen in the open.

Others looked like they’d almost made it to the doors before collapsing where they stood.

There were no birds, no traffic, not even wind. This wasn’t what hope was supposed to look like.

I pressed the collar of my shirt over my nose as the smell hit. It crawled down my throat no matter how hard I tried to block it out.

Flies lifted in thick buzzing clouds with every step we took, loud enough to swallow every other sound.

“Stay quiet,” Shane said, his voice barely above a whisper as he swept his rifle across the plaza

“And keep moving.”

We threaded carefully through the bodies, stepping over outstretched hands and torn clothing until we reached the entrance.

A heavy steel shutter covered the doors. Rick stepped forward immediately, grabbing the bottom edge, trying to haul it up with everything he had.

Metal groaned beneath his hands. It didn’t budge.

He reset his grip, planting both boots firmly on the ground and pulled again.

“Come on…”

He threw everything he had into it one more time. The shutter rattled but stayed shut.

“Rick.” Lori’s voice came tight, urgent.

He ignored her, throwing his weight into it one more time. To no avail. Every scrape of metal echoed across the empty city.

T-Dog flinched hard beside me. “There’s no one in here, man! It’s dead!”

Shane shoved past them, slamming both fists against the shutter.

BANG.

The sound cracked across the plaza.

BANG.

I turned toward the tree line. Walkers were drifting over from other buildings. It started with one, the another, followed another.

Daryl whistled, waving an arm toward our new company. He raised his crossbow, “walkers!”

The word snapped everyone into motion.

Carl burst into tears. Sophia wasn’t far behind. Lori dropped to her knees between them, wrapping both children against her chest. One hand cradled the back of Carl’s head, pulling him close enough to muffle the sound of Rick pounding against the door.

Morales rushed forward beside Shane. Together they grabbed the shutter.

Daryl spun toward Rick, panic written across every inch of his face. “You said this place would be safe!”

“I said maybe!”

“We could still make Fort Benning!” Shane shouted over the rising panic. “Turn around now, we still got daylight!”

“On what gas?” Andrea questioned. “We’re running on fumes!”

Glenn looked toward the convoy. The walkers were crossing the barricades now.

“We need to go.”

“No.” Rick stepped back toward the door.

“Rick.” Shane grabbed his arm. “We have to move.”

Rick froze.

Toward the security camera mounted above the entrance. He squinted slightly, “did you see that?”

“What?” Shane’s grip tightened, still hauling him backward. “Man, there’s nothing there, we gotta go!”

“The camera.” Rick dug his heels in, fighting against Shane’s pull. “It moved!”

Lori grabbed his other arm, both of them dragging him back toward the RV, but Rick wrenched free and threw himself against the shutter, pounding both fists into the metal.

Rick tore free from Shane’s grip, throwing himself against the shutter, both fists hammering the metal.

“I know you can hear me! Please! We’ve got children!” His voice tore raw across the plaza, echoing off the dead buildings around us. He slammed his fist against the steel again. “Don’t leave us out here.”

“Rick!” Shane’s arms locked around his chest, hauling backward with everything he had, boots dragging twin trenches through the dirt.

“Please!” Rick’s voice broke entirely, cracking apart at the edges. “You’re killing us!”

Everything in that second felt impossibly loud, the flies, the crying, the walkers groaning closer through the dark, my own pulse slamming hard in my ears, all of it crashing together into one deafening wall of sound.

Then the shutter lurched open, metal grinding and screeching as it rose, and a wall of blinding white light spilled out across the plaza.

I threw my arm up over my eyes, the light burning straight through my eyelids. 

….

Taglist

Everything seemed good. A little too good.

The camp in my opinion was buzzing with energy, some left over adrenaline maybe, but far different than the one I’d left behind for Atlanta.

Like every night, we started a fire. Amy, Andrea and Dale were sitting across from me. I sat cross legged near the flames, picking bark off a stick and flicking pieces into the fire, watching them curl and blacken.

T-dog and Glenn were by my side.

Rick sat with Carl in his lap, the boy’s small shoulders rising and falling with each breath, already halfway toward sleep but fighting it.

Lori sat close beside them, hands moving slow through Carl’s hair, and even in the low firelight I could see the tear tracks on her face, cutting clean paths through days of dirt and sweat she hadn’t had the chance to wash off.

Relief was clear on her face, but it wasn’t happy relief. It looked different. Almost like guilt.

Dale looked over at Rick. “What was it like? Waking up?”

Rick was quiet for a second, humming as he thought of a good answer.

“I was disoriented,” he said. “I guess that comes closest.” Thunder rumbled somewhere far off, low enough to feel more than hear, none of us moved. “Fear, confusion, all those things, but… disoriented comes closest.”

Dale smiled, still working that same lock of Andrea’s hair between his fingers. “Words can be meager things,” he said. “Sometimes they fall short.”

“I felt like I’d been ripped out of my life,” Rick went on, “and put somewhere else. For a while I thought I was trapped in some coma dream. Something I might not wake up from ever.”

Carl tipped his head back to look up at his father. “Mom said you died.”

Lori’s hand went still in his hair. She didn’t say anything, just laid her palm flat against Carl’s forehead and I watched her throat work around whatever she wasn’t letting herself say out loud.

Rick’s jaw was tight, but his voice stayed even. “She had every reason to believe that. Don’t you ever doubt it.”

Shane stayed silent.

He was the only one without someone tonight. Him and Daryl Dixon, who could be back any minute.

I tipped my head back for a second, found the shape of the Big Dipper and enjoyed the crackle of the fire before Ed decided to ruin it.

He dropped a fat log onto the fire.

Sparks jumped and scattered when the log hit, a few landing close enough to Amy’s boot that she stamped them out fast before they could catch on to anything.

“Getting crowded around here,” he muttered hacking a loogie onto the dirt beside him. His eyes cut toward the new guy, sitting comfortably with Lori and Carl. “More mouths, less to go around.”

Like you need anymore food.

“You wanna rethink that log, Ed?” Shane asked, a red heat creeping up his neck.

“It’s cold, man.”

“Keep it low,” he said. “We want it seen from a hundred yards, not a mile. Walkers see light, they come. People see light, they come too. Either way that’s a problem I don’t want tonight.”

Ed’s mouth twisted, donning that ugly little curl he did all the time. He nudged Carol in the stomach with his elbow. “Go on. Pull the damn thing out. Go on!”

Carol moved fast, faster than I expected from her, faster than I think even she expected from herself.

She reached straight into the fire and dragged the log back before the flames could really take to it. Her hand closed around the end that wasn’t yet burning.

Not that it even mattered.

The wood was hot enough anyway, and she yanked her hand back with a sharp hiss through her teeth, cradling her palm against the soft blue cotton of her shirt trying to press the pain out of it.

“Sorry,” she said immediately to Shane.

I felt Glenn go still beside me.

Somebody’s gotta do something about him.

“So what’s the plan,” I said, looking around the fire at all of them. “What do we tell Daryl?”

All day I’d been thinking about Nikki. If it was her up on that roof, handcuffed and left behind. I wouldn’t have cared what line I had to cross to get her back. Blood didn’t ask permission. I wondered if Daryl would feel the same way about Merle, mean as the man was.

“I’ll tell him,” Rick volunteered. “It should come from me.”

“I locked that door myself.” T-Dog rubbed the back of his neck, and even in the dim light I could see the sweat still drying there. “Padlocked it good. Nothing’s getting through that but a tank. He’s alive up there. Just… stuck.”

“Doesn’t make it easier to say.”

“No it doesn’t.” T-Dog looked toward the fire. “But somebody’s gotta.”

“We could lie,” Amy said sheepishly. She wasn’t a good liar, never had been and I loved her for that even as I watched Andrea shoot the idea down before it could take root.

Andrea found Dale’s fingers, lacing hers through his. “We should tell the truth. Merle was out of control. Something had to be done or he’d have gotten us killed.”

She turned to Lori, her eyes softening but her voice staying firm. “We were all scared. Your husband did what was necessary. And if Merle got left behind, it is nobody’s fault but Merle’s.”

I locked eyes with her across the fire and nodded, my agreement loud and clear. One by one the rest of the group nodded too, the decision passing around the circle.

…..

The first thing I became aware of was the heat. The air inside the tent was thick enough to be soup. The second thing I became aware of was something warm pressed against my face.

I scrunched my nose.

I frowned, still half asleep, and tried to turn my head. It didn’t move. I cracked one eye open just enough to focus.

Five dusty toes inches from my mouth.

Amy’s foot.

Planted square against my face.

I jerked away, banging my shoulder into the side of the tent hard enough to make the whole thing shake. “Amy.” I shoved her ankle. “Amy!”

She mumbled something unintelligible and rolled the other way instead, dragging half the blanket with her. I sat there a second longer, sweat sticking my shirt to my back, before I gave up on sleep entirely and nudged her again, harder.

“Come on. Up.”

She groaned but sat up, hair a bushy mess around her face, and squinted at me like I’d personally wronged her by existing this early.

We crawled out of the tent together into air that was almost a relief after the heat inside, the breeze coming off the water was cool enough to raise goosebumps along my arms.

Dale was already up by the RV, a beat-up percolator hissing softly over the low flame of the camp stove. He greeted us with a tired smile and two tin cups, each one barely more than half full.

“Running low,” he said, like he needed to apologize for it. “Trying to make it stretch.”

I took mine anyway and drank it fast, bitter and weak and still somehow the best thing I’d tasted in days. God bless Dale.

Carl came barreling around the side of the RV before I’d even lowered my cup, sneakers thudding against the packed dirt.

“Carl—”

He skidded to a stop in front of us, cheeks flushed a deep pink, dark strands plastered to his forehead with sweat. Sophia caught up a second later, breathing hard, wisps of hair escaping her barrettes and sticking to the sides of her face. Behind her, the Morales twins bounced from foot to foot, already grinning before anyone had said a word.

“Rum!” Carl blurted. “Rum, can we play Marco Polo? Please? We don’t have chores for another hour.”

The twins nodded so hard I thought one of them might lose their balance, while Sophia offered me the kind of hopeful smile that made saying no feel almost impossible.

I laughed, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “Only if your parents say it’s okay.”

Rick was already walking over, drawn by the sound of his son’s voice pitched that high, and I caught his eye over Carl’s head.

“He bothering you?”

“Never.” I looked down at Carl, who was practically vibrating in place. “Just checking with the boss first.”

Rick’s mouth curved, easy, warm. “Go on. Have fun.”

Carl let out a ‘yes’ and grabbed my hand, already tugging me toward the trees. I set my empty cup down on the RV’s bumper and let him pull me along, throwing one last glance back at Dale.

The shade swallowed us a few steps into the woods, trading the relentless sun. Cicadas buzzed from every direction while the kids scattered between the trees, their laughter echoing in every direction.

“Ready?” Sophia asked, handing me my bandana.

I nodded.

I tied it over my eyes and let them spin me four times before they took off and I stumbled until I found my balance. I counted slowly to ten.

“Marco,” I called, voice swallowed fast by the trees.

Giggling, somewhere off to my left.

“Polo,” Sophia answered, way too eager, giving herself away.

I crept forward, hands out in front of me, feeling the air change where a tree trunk rose up close, the bark rough and damp under my palms when I brushed past it.

“Marco.”

Nothing that time.

I turned in a slow circle, arms still out, waiting for another giggle to give them up. They usually weren’t too good at this game. I caught something to the right and grinned in satisfaction. The closer I got the louder it became.

What were they eating? A low, wet, rhythmic, tearing greeted me as I pushed off another tree.

I pulled the bandana down around my neck.

The morning light hit my eyes through the blurriness so it took a second for the shapes ahead of me to sharpen into something I understood.

A walker crouched maybe fifteen feet off, hunched low over the caved-in belly of a deer carcass, both hands buried wrist deep in it.

I took one step back.

“Carl. Sophia.” I kept my voice a whisper, “get back here. Now.”

Footsteps crashed through the brush behind me, too fast, and before I could turn all the way around they were already there, barreling straight into my legs laughing, thinking the game was still on, thinking I’d found them.

“You lost, you lost, you didn’t even—” Carl’s voice died in his throat.

He went rigid against my side a half second before Sophia’s scream tore through the trees and then the twins were screaming too. The four of them scrambling backward so fast they nearly took me down with them before they broke off running, crashing back through the underbrush toward camp.

I didn’t run. I planted my feet and pulled the knife from my belt. It took maybe ten seconds before I heard the camp behind me erupt, boots pounding hard against packed dirt.

Rick’s voice was cutting through everything, and then they were there, Shane first with his gun already up, Rick right behind him with a shovel.

The rest moved in a loose circle around the carcass, and even a few feet away I could smell it. I fell back automatically, drifting toward where Amy and Andrea stood a few feet off, though my hand stayed curled tight around the handle of the knife on my hip.

Daryl’s knife.

I hadn’t let it out of my reach since he’d pressed it into my palm his first day at camp.

The walker’s head snapped up from the deer’s belly, growling low when it caught sight of Rick, and everything happened fast after that.

Rick swung the shovel first, flat and hard, and the walker went down only to start clawing its way back up again, still hungry even flat on its back in the dirt.

“Ew,” I muttered, mostly to myself, watching Morales and Glenn move in with Jim close behind, all of them raising whatever they had, a pipe, a machete, a length of rebar, and bringing it down again and again until the thing finally stopped trying to stand.

Dale was the one who ended it, his axe coming down clean, and I looked away before it fully connected, my stomach twisting even though I’d seen worse by now. Amy’s hand found my arm, gripping tight, and I realized my palms had gone damp, sweat beading along my hairline despite the cool morning air. I wiped it off with the back of my wrist.

“It’s the first one we’ve had up here,” Dale said, a little breathless, wiping the axe blade against the walkers leg. “They never come this far up the mountain.”

“Well, they’re running out of food in the city,” Jim said. “That’s what.”

A branch snapped in the trees, followed by the soft crunch of footsteps, and every weapon in the clearing came up at once.

Shane raised his shotgun, sweeping it slow across the tree line until a man stepped out from behind a rock with a crossbow slung across his body.

Shane lowered his gun.

“Oh, Jesus,” Shane said, half a laugh in it.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor of me.

Shit.

He didn’t look my way yet. Focus locked on the deer.

“Son of a bitch. That’s my deer.” He stalked closer, kicking at the carcass hard enough that dust and flies rose up off it. “Look at it. All gnawed on by this… filthy, disease bearing, motherless poxy bastard.”

“Calm down, son,” Dale said. “That’s not helping.”

Daryl rounded on him fast, “what do you know about it, old man? Why don’t you take that stupid hat and go back to On Golden Pond.” He blew out a hard breath, dragging a hand down his face. “I’ve been tracking this deer for miles.”

“Gonna drag it back to camp, cook us up some venison.” He crouched, inspecting the chewed section with something close to genuine grief. “What do you think. You think we can cut around this chewed up part right here?”

“I would not risk that,” Shane said.

The man sighed, long and put upon. “That’s a damn shame. I got some squirrel, about a dozen or so. That’ll have to do.”

Behind him, the walker’s severed head started snapping its jaw against the dirt, teeth clicking together in a rhythm that made my skin crawl even now.

“Oh God,” Amy breathed, and she was already pulling Andrea back a step, both of them turning away.

“Come on, people. What the hell?” Daryl drew his bow in one smooth motion and put an arrow clean through the thing’s eye socket, silencing it in an instant.

He planted his boot on the skull and yanked the arrow back out, wiping it off against his jeans like it was nothing at all. “It’s gotta be the brain. Don’t y’all know nothing?”

I felt Amy’s hand close around my wrist, tugging. “Come on,” she whispered. “I don’t need to see any more of this.”

I let her pull me back up the trail.

….

The fight itself didn’t need retelling in full, not really. Word of it moved through camp faster than the dust had settled, Daryl swinging on Rick and missing, Shane choking him down into the dirt, T-Dog’s confession about the key.

By the time I found Glenn and T-Dog by the RV, elbows deep in one of Dale’s old road maps spread flat across the hood, Daryl was off somewhere sharpening something with more force than the blade probably needed.

“So he knows,” I said, coming up beside them. The metal of the hood was already warm under my palms where I leaned in to look at the map. “About the roof.”

“Knows,” T-Dog said, not looking up. “Didn’t take it well.”

“Shocking.” I traced a finger along the marked route, the ink faded soft from being folded and unfolded too many times. “Merle might not even still be up there. It’s been a full day. If that chain gave, or if he found a way to pick the cuff—”

“Doesn’t matter,” T-Dog said, cutting me off, gentle but firm. “We gotta go back either way and see for ourselves. Can’t just leave ‘em.”

Glenn nodded, already tapping a spot on the map. “Plus there’s the guns. Rick had to drop the bag running from that herd, it’s gotta still be right around here, if nobody’s found it yet.” He counted off on his fingers, that particular focus settling over his face that always meant he’d already done the math twice. “Shotguns, rifles, dozen handguns. That’s not something we can just leave lying in the street.”

“Yeah, no, I get it,” I said. “That’s worth the risk.”

“I’ll go find Dale,” T-Dog said, straightening up and stretching his back with a low groan. “See what tools he’s got we can bring. Bolt cutters, hacksaw, whatever’ll get through a cuff if it comes to that.”

He headed off toward the RV’s side compartment, leaving Glenn and me alone over the map for a second.

He glanced at me sideways, a little shy smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“You know,” he said, “I kinda figured I’d have to rescue you from that walker earlier. Not that you’d let me. You’ve been rescuing yourself since you got here.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Is that your way of flirting?”

“Depends.” His ears had gone a little pink. “Is it working?”

Before I could answer, the horn on the cube van blared out sharp and obnoxious across camp, cutting through everything. We turned to find Daryl braced against the open driver’s side door, one boot propped up on the frame, stomping the horn with his heel while Glenn’s actual seat sat empty behind the wheel.

“Come on!” Daryl hollered, not even glancing our way. “Let’s go!”

Glenn sighed, folding the map fast. “Duty calls.”

…

So far, the guys had only been gone thirty minutes. The sun was warm on the back of my neck, and the smell of wet cotton and lavender soap hung thick around all of us against the muddier smell of the water itself.

“Okay,” Andrea said, wringing out one of Dale’s shirts hard enough that her knuckles went white. “What do you miss most.”

“Twinkies,” I said without even having to think about it. “Don’t laugh. Those things were basically immortal, and I never once got the chance to prove it.”

Amy snorted, water dripping off the shirt she was scrubbing. “Air conditioning. I would sell an organ.”

“Real coffee,” Jacqui said, closing her eyes like she could taste it just from saying the words. “Not whatever Dale’s rationing out of that percolator.”

“My vibrator,” Andrea said, completely serious, and the laugh that broke out of me came so fast I nearly dropped the shirt I was scrubbing into the water.

Carol’s head came up. For a second I thought she’d pretend not to hear it but instead a small, surprised laugh slipped out of her, and she ducked her head like she’d shocked herself with it.

“Me too,” she admitted, barely above a whisper, and that was what finally broke all of us wide open, Amy doubling over, Jacqui laughing so hard she had to brace a hand against the rock beside her.

Once again things felt almost perfect.

Then I heard him, heavy boots on gravel, unhurried. Ed came up the bank with a cigarette already burning between his fingers. “What’s so damn funny?”

“Just swapping war stories, Ed,” Andrea said, not even looking up from her scrubbing.

“Yeah,” Amy added, quieter, the laughter already draining out of her face.

He didn’t answer that. He just walked until he was standing directly behind Carol, close enough that she went rigid, her hands going still in the water.

“Problem, Ed?” Andrea’s voice had an edge to it now.

“Nothin’ that concerns you.” He looked down at Carol, exhaled smoke over her shoulder. “And you ought to focus on your work. This ain’t no comedy club.”

Andrea huffed out a breath through her nose, sharp with disgust, but she let it go for the moment, turning back to her own pile. Down by the water’s edge Lori had already drifted off toward Carl and Shane, oblivious or maybe just choosing not to see, and Ed lit another cigarette off the first, still standing there like a shadow that overstayed its welcome.

I watched Carol’s shoulders curl inward, smaller, like she was trying to fold herself down to a size he wouldn’t bother noticing. My jaw tightened, and I felt that same coiled thing from the campfire the other night wake back up in my chest.

Andrea shot up first, a wet shirt still balled in her fist. “Ed, tell you what. You don’t like how your laundry is done, you’re welcome to pitch in and do it yourself.” She hurled it at him. “Here.”

He caught it against his chest and threw it back twice as hard, snapping it across her face before it fell.

“Oh!” Andrea flinched back, wiping soap water off her cheek.

I set my scrubbing down slow and looked up at him with the kind of smile I knew didn’t reach my eyes. “You know, Ed, for a man who does absolutely nothing around this camp, you sure work up a mean sweat standing there watching a woman scrub your underwear.” I tilted my head, all sugar. “Must be exhausting. All that supervising.”

A couple of the women went quiet and I felt Carol’s eyes flick to me fast, like nobody had ever said something like that out loud in front of him before.

Ed’s face went dark, thin lips pursing around the cigarette, but I just held his stare.

Ed’s shadow fell long across the rocks, and up close like this I could see just how big he actually was, thick through the shoulders, a good foot taller than Carol. “Ain’t my job, missy,” he spit, smoke curling out with the words.

“Guys, don’t,” Amy said quietly, already shrinking back a step.

“What is your job, Ed?” Andrea’s voice was sharp enough to cut. “Sitting on your ass smoking cigarettes?”

“Well, it sure as hell ain’t listening to some uppity smart mouthed bitch.” His eyes cut to Carol. “Tell you what. Come on. Let’s go.”

He reached down and closed his hand around her arm, and the bar of soap slipped from her fingers, dropping into the shallow water with a small splash that felt too loud in the sudden silence.

“I don’t think she needs to go anywhere with you, Ed,” Andrea said, rising to her feet.

“And I say it’s none of your business. Come on now. You heard me.”

“Carol.” Andrea’s hand landed on her shoulder, steady, trying to anchor her.

“Andrea, please.” Carol’s voice had gone thin and pleading. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Hey.” Ed’s voice cracked like a whip, and Andrea turned back to face him fully.

“Don’t think I won’t knock you on your ass just cause you’re some college educated cooze. All right?”

Andrea sucked in a breath.

“Now you come on now,” Ed said, “or you gonna regret it later.”

“So she can show up with fresh bruises later, Ed?” Jacqui’s voice cut through, flat and furious. “Yeah, we’ve seen them.”

He laughed. Actually laughed.

“Stay out of this,” Ed said, louder now, sweeping his gaze over all of us like he was daring somebody to keep talking. “Now come on. You know what, this ain’t none of y’all’s business. You don’t want to keep prodding the bull here, okay. Now I am done talking. Come on.”

He tightened his grip on Carol’s arm.

“No.” Andrea stepped in closer. “No. Carol, you don’t have to—“

Carol said something too low for me to catch, barely a whisper, and Ed’s face twisted.

“You don’t tell me what,” he snapped. “I tell you what.”

His hand came down fast, and the sound of it landing across Carol’s face was sharp and wet all at once, loud enough that I felt it somewhere behind my own teeth.

She staggered sideways, her hand flying up to her cheek, and everything in me went red.

I was moving before I even decided to, same as Amy, same as all of us, a scramble of wet hands and raised voices closing in around him.

“Get off her!” Amy’s voice cracked on it.

“Come here.” Ed had a fistful of Carol’s shirt now, dragging her back toward him. “Come here!”

“Get off her! Get off her!” Andrea was shouting it over and over, and I heard my own voice join in somewhere in the noise, rough and furious, my hands already reaching for his arm even though I knew, distantly, that I probably wasn’t strong enough to do a damn thing about a man that size.

None of us saw Shane arrive. One second Ed’s hand was locked around Carol, the next Shane had him by the collar, hauling him backward and off her with a force that sent them both stumbling.

“Get off me!” Ed thrashed against his grip, twisting hard. “Get off me!”

I stood there breathing hard, salt water and soap and the sharp copper smell of Carol’s split lip all tangled together in the air, my hands still curled into fists at my sides, shaking with adrenaline.

Shane threw him down onto the rocks and went after him before Ed even had the chance to brace, his fist landing again and again, that same sick wet sound as before but harder now, faster, no rhythm to it at all.

Ed threw his arms up to shield his face and Shane just tore them away and kept going, and I felt myself flinch with every hit even as some ugly, honest part of me didn’t look away.

I got an arm around Carol before she could go to him, Amy taking her other side, both of us holding her back while she strained against us.

“No!” she cried, the word breaking apart in her throat.

Shane had Ed by the shirt front now, dragging him half upright just to hit him again, the left side of his face already swelling dark, split open at the brow, blood running down into the collar of his shirt.

There was something almost frightening in the sheer amount of rage still pouring out of Shane.

“Stop it!” Carol screamed, thrashing against my grip. “Stop!”

I held on tighter, my mouth close to her ear. “He’s okay, you’re okay, just breathe,” I said, not even sure which one of us I was trying to convince.

Shane finally went still, chest heaving, still gripping Ed’s collar with one fist. He leaned in close, finger jabbing hard into what was left of Ed’s face.

“You put your hands on your wife, your little girl, or anybody else in this camp one more time,” he said, low and shaking, “I will not stop. Do you hear me?”

He grabbed Ed’s jaw and forced his head up.

“Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” Ed slurred, barely a word at all through the blood in his mouth.

Shane let go. Ed crumpled sideways onto the rocks and Carol tore free from us at last, dropping to her knees beside him.

“Ed, I’m sorry.” She was already crying harder, her hands hovering over him like she didn’t know where it was safe to touch. “Oh my God, Ed, I’m sorry.”

I stood there with Amy, both of us breathing hard, watching a woman apologize to the man who’d just split her lip open. I didn’t say anything. I just watched.

….

The rest of camp had a hum about them. Usually it only shows up on good days, laughter overlapping with the clink of pots and the slap of wet clothes being wrung out and hung along the RV’s side mirrors to dry.

Someone flung a basin of gray dishwater out toward the tree line, and it hit the leaves with a soft, scattering hiss. Carol was passing a bar of soap over to Jacqui, both of them trading it back and forth like it was something precious, which by now it basically was.

I sat cross legged near the fire pit with Lori, the sun warm on my shoulders, laughing so hard at whatever Carl had just said about girls and cooties that I nearly choked on the water I was drinking.

“You’re absolutely right,” I told him, and Lori was still laughing when Amy and Andrea came walking back into camp, a heavy string of fish swinging between them, scales flashing silver in the light.

I let out a low whistle, long and appreciative.

Morales looked up from across camp and broke into a grin. “Oh, baby. Will you look at that.” He jogged over, laughing. “Hey, check it out. Ladies.”

Andrea handed the string over to him with a flourish, and Lori actually applauded, Carol smiling wide beside her, a rare, easy thing on her face.

“Because of you,” Morales said, hefting the fish like a trophy, “my children will eat tonight. Thank you.”

“Thank Dale,” Andrea said. “It’s his canoe and gear.”

Jacqui met her with a high five that cracked sharp through the air.

“Mom, look.” Carl was already tugging at Lori’s sleeve. “Look at all the fish.”

Morales swung the string toward Lori, who pulled back laughing, holding a hand up against the smell. “Thank you.”

“Whoa,” Carl breathed, wide eyed.

“Yeah, whoa.” Lori looked between the sisters.

“Where did you two learn to do that?”

“Our dad,” Amy said.

“Can you teach me how to do that?”

“Sure.” Amy crouched down to Carl’s level, grinning. “I’ll teach you all about nail knots and stuff.” She glanced up at Lori.

Dale came ambling back into camp just then, and Andrea called over to him, leaning back on her hands with the easy, unbothered air of someone who already knew the problem would be handled.

“Hey, Dale, when’s the last time you oiled those line reels? They are a disgrace.”

“I, uh.” Dale slowed. “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we may have a bit of a problem.”

The easy noise of camp didn’t stop all at once, but I felt it falter, felt Lori’s laughter die a beat too fast beside me.

Shane pushed up from where he’d been sitting and crossed over, and Dale tipped his head toward the hilltop behind him, toward the shape of Jim up the hill, shovel in hand, digging.

Can’t we have one normal day.

….

Jim didn’t stop even with half the camp gathered around him now, sweat soaking clean through his shirt, he kept driving the shovel down into the dirt.

Over and over and over again.

The sound of it hollow and rhythmic against the baked ground. Shane held up a hand as he approached. “Hey, Jim. Jim, why don’t you hold up, all right? Just give me a second here, please?”

“What do you want?”

“We’re all just a little concerned, that’s all.”

“Dale says you’ve been out here for hours,” Morales added.

“So?”

“So why are you digging? Are you heading to China, Jim?”

“What does it matter? I’m not hurting anyone.” He didn’t even pause between sentences, the shovel biting into earth again and again.

“Yeah, except maybe yourself.” Dale’s voice had gone gentle but firm. “It’s a hundred degrees today. You can’t keep this up.”

“Sure I can. Watch me.”

“Jim, I’m not here to argue with you, all right? Just give me the shovel, okay?”

Jim yanked it back out of Shane’s reach. “No. No, no.”

Shane pressed forward and Jim shoved him back hard enough that I felt the whole crowd of us tense at once.

“Just give me the—Jim!”

Jim swung the shovel in a wild circle, and Shane ducked under it and drove him straight to the ground, both of them grunting into the dirt.

“Okay, shh, shh.”

“You got no right!” Jim thrashed under him.

“Stop. Shh.”

“You got no right!”

Shane rolled him onto his belly and wrenched one arm back, and Morales dropped down to help pin him while Shane got the cuffs on.

Between the two of them they hauled Jim back down to camp and tied him off against a tree trunk, his chest heaving, dirt caked thick under his fingernails.

I filled a cup from the water jug and carried it over, along with a second one I poured slow over the top of his head, watching it clear some of the dust and sweat on his face.

“Here.” I held the second cup to his mouth.

“Drink.”

He did, greedy, some of it running down his chin, and I crouched there beside him a moment longer than I probably needed to.

There was something about Jim, steady hands even shaking like this, a kindness that lived under the surface no matter what, that reminded me of my father bent over some neighbor’s engine on a Sunday afternoon, grease up to his elbows, never once asking for anything back.

I hadn’t let myself think about that in a while.

Jim’s eyes drifted over toward where Carol and Lori were working with Carl and Sophia. “Sorry if I scared your boy and your little girl,” he said.

“You had sunstroke,” Lori told him. “Nobody’s blaming you.”

“You’re not scared now, are you?”

“No sir,” Sophia said, small and steady.

I smiled, relieved at the sight of the whole camp starting to breathe easy again after a morning that had gone sideways twice already. “Jim, do you know why you were digging? Can you say?”

He was quiet a second, working it over. “I had a reason. Don’t remember. Something I dreamt last night.” He looked to Carl. “Your dad was in it. You were worried about him.”

“They’re not back yet,” Carl said.

“There ain’t nothing gonna stop him from getting back here to you and your mom,” Jim said. “I promise you that.”

Shane rolled the handle of the bucket through his fingers, his gaze fixed on the fish instead of anyone around him. After a beat, he cleared his throat.

“All right.” He hoisted the bucket off the ground with more force than necessary. “Who wants to help me clean some fish, huh?”

Everyone drifted down toward the water, Jacqui hanging back to keep Jim company under his tree, and the rest of us spent the better part of an hour with our pants rolled up to our knees, hands slick with scales, fingers gone soft and pruney in the cold water.

By the time we climbed back up the bank the whole camp smelled like fish and sunscreen, everybody grinning like the morning had never happened.

“Hey, Jim.” Shane crouched down in front of him. “How you feeling, man?”

“I’m better. More myself now.”

“Okay.” Shane huffed out a laugh. “Why don’t you come join in with the rest of us? Big ol’ fish fry.”

Jim looked past him, toward Carl. “I’d like that very much.”

“Okay.”

…..

The sun hovered just above the tree line, painting the camp in soft shades of orange. I settled onto my log with a plate balanced on my knees, mostly picked clean.

Smoke drifted between us, carrying the smell of fried fish, rich enough to make my stomach growl all over again.

Morales was teasing Dale about his watch. I glanced over just in time to catch the look on dales face.

He frowned at it, then met morales eyes again. “What’s wrong with my watch?”

“I see you every day,” Morales said, grinning, “same time, winding that thing like a village priest saying Mass.”

Andrea pointed at Dale in agreement, mouth too full of fish to actually back him up out loud.

“I’ve wondered this myself,” Jacqui admitted.

“Time. It’s important to keep track, isn’t it? The days, at least.” Dale looked to Andrea. “Don’t you think? Back me up here.”

Andrea just laughed, and I caught the way her eyes flicked toward Amy for half a second.

Amy pushed up from the fire a little unsteady, the rum Morales had scavenged clearly doing its work on her, and set her cup down in the dirt.

“And where exactly are you going?” I asked.

“I have to pee,” she announced, then laughed at herself. “Jeez, you try to be discreet around here.”

She wandered off toward the RV, and I waited a minute before pulling the little box out from where I’d tucked it into my jacket, the bracelet inside catching the firelight. It was a match to the necklace Andrea had lifted off that same department store counter.

I’d been saving it, waiting for the right moment to hand it over.

The RV door creaked open above us. Amy stood in the frame, one hand braced on the door, calling down into camp.

“We’re out of toilet paper!”

A low growl answered her from somewhere behind the door, and before any of us could process the sound a pale arm shot out and closed around her wrist, teeth sinking into it in one brutal motion.

Amy screamed.

Andrea turned first, and whatever was on her face when she saw it broke something inside me.

More shapes were already shoving out from sort path, more growling, more screaming rising up on every side of camp at once, and the little box slipped clean out of my hand into the dirt as I shot to my feet, the whole world tilting sideways in an instant.

“Mom!” Carl’s voice cracked high and panicked.

“Carl!” Lori dove for him, wrapping herself around his small body, pulling him down and shielding him with everything she had.

Across the fire Carol snatched Sophia up against her chest in the same motion, both women folding themselves over their children like it might actually be enough to stop these brain hungry monsters.

Shane raised his shotgun, the sound of it cocking loud over the screaming. “Lori, get him down!”

He planted himself between the family and the chaos pouring in from every direction, firing fast, the muzzle flash strobing white against the dark.

Jim swung a baseball bat in wide, catching one walker across the skull hard enough to drop it where it stood.

Carol crouched low behind him, Sophia’s face pressed hard into her shoulder so she wouldn’t have to see any of it.

“Carol! Move, now, come on!” I grabbed her arm and hauled her upright, Sophia’s small hand finding mine on the other side, ice cold and shaking.

The RV sat closest, its metal side catching flashes of gunfire like a strobe, and I half dragged the two of them toward it, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat.

A walker lurched out of the dark to my right and I didn’t think, just swung my knife up and across, felt it catch bone and drag, hot and wet over my knuckles, and shoved the thing off its feet without even breaking stride.

“Up, up, go!” I got Sophia’s foot on the bottom step and pushed, Carol scrambling in right behind her, and I hauled myself up last, slamming the door shut behind us hard enough that the whole frame rattled.

Inside was dim. Muffled screaming leaking in through the metal walls like it was happening underwater.

I peered out through the gap in the curtain, chest heaving, trying to find any shape out there I recognized.

“Ed.” Carol’s voice cracked behind me. “Rum, please, Ed’s out there, I don’t, I don’t know where he went, please, you have to go find him.”

I turned to look at her and for a second I didn’t say anything at all. Every ugly thing I’d ever thought about that man rose up.

But her eyes were wide and pleading in a way that had nothing to do with what he deserved and everything to do with what she still felt for him anyway, and Sophia was watching me too.

“Stay down. Both of you. Don’t leave this R.V. for anything. No matter who screams or begs. You stay here.” I was already moving back toward it, knife still slick in my hand.

“I’ll find him.”

Yeah I’ll find him.

….

The dark outside the RV was chaos given shape. Both gunfire and screaming layered thick over each other. The moment my boots hit the ground, the night swallowed me whole. Smoke stung my eyes. The air around me tasted like gunpowder.

Walkers moved through the dark in jerking shadows, appearing and disappearing in the firelight like the woods themselves were spitting them out.

“Stay close!” Shane’s voice cut through somewhere to my left.

A girl I didn’t recognize came sprinting out of the dark, fleeing one walker straight into the arms of another. She got one scream out then vanished under a crush of bodies before I could even reach for her.

Morales dropped one walker with his bat and spun around taking down another, his wife and kids pressed tight behind his back.

Smoke stung my eyes.

“Come on, y’all! Work your way up here!” Shane was shouting.

“Right in front of you! Shane!” Lori’s voice, sharp with warning.

“Get to the RV!” Morales barked at his family. “Go!”

I kept low, hugging the dark edges where the firelight didn’t reach, moving fast toward the cluster of tents on the far side of camp.

Every step felt wrong. Too loud. Too exposed.

Thankfully, no one dead or alive noticed me slip past, everyone’s attention on the fight closer to the fire. A few walkers drifted loose near the tree line, slow and aimless, not yet locked onto anything. I held my breath and threaded between them, my pulse a hard, frantic drum in my ears.

One of them turned as I passed, milky eyes catching the faint light. Its shoulder brushed my sleeve. The skin felt cold and wet through the fabric, and bile jumped into the back of my throat, but I kept moving.

You stop, you die.

Ed’s tent sat crooked, the canvas glowing faint orange from whatever light was bleeding through the fabric. I dropped to a crouch at the zipper and yanked it down in one hard motion.

“What the hell-” Ed jerked upright. One side of his face a deep purple, his lip split wide enough dried blood crusted into his stubble. “You get outta here,” he snapped, already working himself up. “This ain’t your damn business.”

“We’re surrounded.” I kept my voice low, urgent. “You need to move. Right now.”

He stared at me for half a second before waving me off like I’d interrupted him over nothing.

“Where’s Carol?”

My stomach sank.

“Ed—”

“Where is she?” His voice climbed louder. “You tell that bitch to get her ass back here. I ain’t done talkin’ to her.”

The words almost didn’t register.

Outside, gunfire cracked through the trees.

Someone screamed.

Another scream cut off so suddenly it left the woods feeling wrong.

And all he could think about was Carol.

“Ed.” I glanced over my shoulder toward the tree line. Low, hungry moans drifted through the dark, closer than before. “You need to shut up.”

“I’ll teach her to walk away from me.” He shoved himself onto his knees, wobbling for a second before catching himself on a tent pole. His face twisted with anger instead of pain. “Think she can embarrass me in front of everybody? I’ll knock her ass flat when I find her.”

Even beaten half to death, he still wanted another shot at her.

Something inside me went cold.

“Ed,” I said one last time.

He pointed a finger at me.

“You don’t tell me what to—”

Behind me, one of the walkers turned.

Then another.

Their heads lifted together at the sound of his voice carrying through camp.

“Ed.” My voice was flat now. “You’re drunk.”

He just kept yelling.

About Carol.

About respect.

About what she deserved.

People were dying not even twenty yards away.

And somehow this pathetic excuse for a man still thought the most important thing in it was making sure his wife knew her place.

Something in me finally snapped.

I stepped past him.

Grabbed the nearest walker by a fistful of greasy hair.

Its head whipped toward me with a wet snarl, dead fingers clawing at the air as I planted my feet and hauled it sideways. Pain tore through my shoulder, but anger carried me farther than adrenaline ever could.

I yanked the tent flap open with my free hand.

Then shoved the walker inside.

It crashed into him with a guttural growl, jaws already snapping.

“There.”

My chest heaved.

I didn’t even recognize my own voice.

“Talk to it.”

….

Part 4

….

Tag list

A few days after my talk with Daryl, Shane rounded everyone together mid morning for a meeting while he stood in the middle of camp with Glenn beside him.

“We need to talk about supplies,” he said. “Food’s getting low. Medical kit is almost out of the basics. We need guns if we’re going to keep a proper watch on this camp.” He looked around the circle of faces. “I need people willing to make a run into the city.”

There was silence for a second until T-Dog’s hand went up before Shane could plead with the crowd. “I’m in.”

Jackie was beside him with her arms crossed. “Where he goes I go.”

Shane nodded. Looked around.

Morales was standing with his arm around his wife’s waist, her leaning into his side. He looked down at her for a second, a look of understanding between them that prompted her to give the smallest nod.

“Me too,” he said.

“I’ll go,” Andrea said, from the other side of the circle. Very matter of fact, no hesitation. She wasn’t the best shot but she would do.

Shane wrote something on the notepad before handing it back to Glenn. He was looking at the ground doing math in his head, already thinking about streets and routes and how to move through the city efficiently.

I was standing at the back of the group with my arms crossed and I did not say anything. I wasn’t sure if I could handle myself. I’d only been against one walker and it was my mom.

Shane looked around again. “Anyone else?”

The circle was quiet. Carol had Sophia pulled close to her side. Dale was watching Shane with his steady patient eyes. Lori had her hand on Carl’s shoulder.

Shane nodded once. “Alright. Glenn’s going to lead on the ground, he knows those streets better than anybody. We’re looking for canned food, anything with shelf life, medical supplies, and firearms if we can find them. Don’t take risks you don’t need to take.”

“When?” T-Dog asked.

“Wheels up in two hours.”

Merle was leaning against a tree at the edge of the group picking at his thumbnail. “While y’all are playing errand boy,” he said, “Daryl’ll head out. See what he can bring back. I’ll come to Atlanta.”

Daryl said nothing, just shifted the crossbow on his shoulder and looked at the tree line.

“Good,” Shane said. “We need it.”

The group started breaking up, people moving off to get ready or get back to what they’d been doing. I stayed where I was.

Glenn drifted over with his map already unfolded.

“You should come,” he said, not looking up from it.

“I’m good here.”

“We need people who can handle themselves.” He glanced up. “You can handle yourself.”

I looked at the map. At the streets marked in Glenn’s careful handwriting, routes traced in pencil. I thought about sitting in this camp for another day watching the tree line and waiting for Daryl Dixon to come back with something to eat.

“Two hours?” I said.

Glenn nodded.

“Fine.”

He smiled at the map like he was trying not to and went off to find T-Dog. I stood there for a second in the middle of the emptying camp and looked at the quarry sitting flat and silver through the trees and thought about Atlanta and what was sitting inside it and told myself it was fine.

It was fine.

….

Two hours went fast.

I had my bag packed and sitting outside my tent as I was lacing my boots when the group started pulling itself together around the van. People drifted over to say goodbyes and making request, not wanting to be involved but not wanting to miss it either.

Andrea and Amy came up from the quarry path together, fingers laced, seeming closer than they had earlier weeks at camp. They’d been down there a while. Amy’s eyes were pink at the edges and she was doing best to keep smiling to so she didn’t cry.

Andrea was holding herself very still on purpose. They walked through the camp like that, hands swinging slightly between them, and Andrea stopped at the van and turned, pulling Amy in hard, both arms around her, her chin over Amy’s shoulder.

Amy’s hands fisted in the back of Andrea’s shirt.

“It’s a supply run,” Andrea said into her hair. “We’ll be back tonight.”

“I know,” Amy said. Her voice was mostly steady. “I know that.”

They stayed like that for another second. Then Andrea pulled back and held Amy by the face for a moment and admired her.

“Almost your birthday,” she said.

Amy laughed, wet around the edges. “You keep saying that.”

“Because it keeps being true.” Andrea kissed her forehead and picked up her bag and got in the van and looked straight ahead.

Amy stood there with her arms crossed watching the van door and breathed through her nose until her eyes cleared.

Merle and Daryl were off to the side of all of it, close together, voices low. From where I was standing they looked almost angry at each other, the way Merle had one hand on the back of his neck like a dog you weren’t fond of.

I saw Daryl was staring at the ground, barely reacting to anything Merle said until Merle made some sharp comment that finally got him to look up and answer.

Merle clapped him once on the shoulder, hard, and walked away.

Lori caught me before I got to the van, coming over with a folded piece of paper and a look that was almost apologetic.

“I know you’re going to be busy,” she said, holding it out. “But if you happen to come across any of this.”

I took the paper and unfolded it. A small list in her handwriting, neat and slanted. Children’s Tylenol. Toothpaste. Socks, size small. At the bottom, underlined once, chocolate if there is any.

I looked up at her.

“Carl’s been asking,” she said, and something in her face was softer than usual this morning, lighter. She looked happier than I’d seen her in a while, and it wasn’t forced. “And I just thought if it was there.”

“I’ll look,” I said, and folded the list into my jacket pocket.

“Thank you.” She squeezed my arm once and picked up her bucket from the ground beside her. “I’m going to get water before it gets hot.” She nodded toward the woods path that ran down to the quarry and headed off through the trees humming something, bucket swinging at her side.

Shane appeared at my shoulder. “She seem alright to you?” he said, watching the trees where she’d gone.

“She seemed good actually, happy.”

He nodded, something settling in him slightly. He looked at the van and then back at the woods. “Look after yourself while I’m—” He stopped. “I mean while you’re gone.”

“I’ll grab you something while I’m in there.”

He looked at me sideways.

“See! That right there. Don’t make it weird,” I complained, rolling my eyes and punched his shoulder. “Just say thank you and move on.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Yeah alright.” He looked at the tree line one more time and then headed off toward the woods in the same direction Lori had gone, hands in his pockets, unhurried.

I picked up my bag and walked to the van.

Glenn slid the door open from inside and held out a hand to help me up and I took it and climbed in and pulled the door shut behind me. The van smelled like old leather and fish breakfast with a side of body odor. There were too many people in a small space on this warm morning.

T-Dog looked back at me from the middle seat. “Ready?”

I put my bag between my feet and looked out the window at the camp sitting quiet in the morning light.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

….

An hour into the city and my neck hurt from looking up.

I couldn’t help it. The buildings came up on both sides of us so tall and so close together that the sky was just a strip of pale blue running between them, and standing at the bottom of all that glass and concrete made something in my chest go tight.

I’d never been actually been to Atlanta before. Not really. I’d driven past it on the highway a hundred times but that wasn’t the same as being inside it, feeling small inside it, the shadows falling heavy and cold across the pavement even with the sun still up.

It was so quiet here.

That was the part that kept getting me. A city this size should have been loud just breathing. Traffic and horns and somebody’s music leaking out of a window three floors up. Instead there was just our footsteps on the asphalt and the wind moving through the gap between buildings with a low hollow sound, and every now and then something far off that none of us commented on.

Glenn had us tight together, moving fast, hand signals instead of words where he could manage it. He knew these streets like the back of his hand, Glenn could cut through alleys I wouldn’t have noticed were even there.

Nobody questioned him.

Even Merle kept his mouth shut and followed, which told me more about how nervous he actually was than anything else would have.

The warehouse sat at the end of a service road. A loading dock with doors shut and padlocked. Glenn pointed at Merle without looking at him. Merle already had something out of his pocket.

Forty seconds and the lock was open.

The employee entrance was narrow and dark, the smell hitting me before my eyes adjusted. Dust and old cardboard and underneath it something sweeter, like a spill that had dried a long time ago and never quite left. The shelves went up to the ceiling in long rows, the light coming in gray through the high windows, everything perfectly still.

Glenn split us into pairs with a look and a point and everyone moved off into the shelves.

I went left.

The soap aisle was three rows back and I smelled it before I found it, that sharp clean smell cutting through the dust, and I stood in front of the shelf and looked at the options the way I used to stand in a drugstore with twenty dollars deciding what Ice cream to keep and what to put back. I grabbed two bars of the good stuff and dropped them in my bag.

I moved down the row slowly, dragging two fingers along the shelf edge, reading each label. The other shelves had the rest of what we needed, unopened box of tampons, body oil, Tylenol. I was hitting the jackpot.

No chocolate though.

Merle’s voice floated over from somewhere to my right, probably talking at T-Dog whether T-Dog wanted conversation or not.

I found a rack of pocket knives near the back wall, wrapped inside a little cardboard sleeve. I picked one up and felt the weight of it. Light but it would do in a tight spot for Amy. Then I picked up a second one.

That one I turned over in my hand for a second, thinking about Shane.

I dropped it in my bag.

Down the next row I found a shelf of those little travel sized things, deodorant, toothpaste and lotion in a wire basket. I grabbed a handful and stuffed them in without looking at the labels because something that smelled like anything was better than body odor. There was a candle on the shelf below, thick and white, blueberry pie. I took that too.

I could hear Glenn moving two rows over, I stood still for a second and listened to the warehouse breathe around me, the gray light coming down through the high windows and falling across the concrete floor in long pale rectangles. six hours ago I was sitting at the quarry with cold hands and now I was here, inside a dead city, stealing soap.

I almost laughed.

I didn’t, but almost.

…

The door to the roof was heavy and rusted at the hinge and it took Merle’s shoulder to get it open all the way. The heat hit us like a brick wall the second we stepped out, that thick flat Atlanta summer heat with nowhere to go and nothing to cut it, bouncing up off the tar paper and pressing down from the sky at the same time.

The hair at the nape of my neck dripped the second we cleared the doorway.

From what I could see, the roof was wide and low walled, the city spreading out in every direction below us, and for a second everyone just stood there and looked at it.

All those empty streets below us. All those still cars sitting in the intersections at every angle like somebody had just walked away from them mid-turn and never come back.

The buildings rose up around us on all sides and from up I’m here you could see just how far it went, block after block of nothing moving, the summer haze sitting over all of it in a pale shimmer.

Morales had the binoculars out already, scanning the streets.

I stood at the edge and put my hands on the concrete and looked down at the street below. The tar paper under my boots was soft from the heat, sticking faintly with each step.

Andrea came to stand beside me and I could see the line on her forearm where her sleeve had been, that sharp stripe of pale skin against tan, and I had the same thing on both arms, farmers fans were not my favorite.

Everyday I wished we could’ve been stuck at the beach instead of a small quarry off the highway.

Merle moved along the wall toward Andrea with an energy that told screamed “the apocalypse was a better time than ever.” He leaned on the wall beside her and squinted out at the street below and said, “So you and the old man, huh.”

Andrea glared at him.

“Dale.” Merle said the name like it was funny. “That your situation?”

“That’s none of your situation,” Andrea snapped back.

Merle grinned at the street. “All I’m saying is the man’s too old to get it up. You could do better.” He glanced sideways at her. “Significantly better.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Just putting it out there.”

“Consider it received and discarded.”

Merle laughed and moved off down the wall. T-Dog caught my eye from across the roof and shook his head once. These old men were so bold.

The sun was full on the roof now with nothing between us and it, and my tank top was sticking to my back way past uncomfortable and more of a sweaty mess. Morales wiped his face with the back of his arm and kept the binoculars moving.

Glenn was crouched near the far edge with a city map folded open on the concrete, finger tracing routes, lips moving slightly.

Then the gunshots went off.

they ricocheted off the buildings and came at us from two directions at once so you couldn’t place it right away. Everyone on that roof went still at the same time.

Morales had the binoculars up and pointing before the echo died. He tracked for a second, swung left, stopped.

“There.” He handed them to Glenn.

Glenn stood up and put them to his eyes and was quiet for a long moment. He pulled them down and looked at the street and then back through the binoculars like he was checking that he’d seen it right.

“There’s an officer down there,” he said. “On horseback. He’s coming up through the intersection on Fifth.” He paused. “There are a lot of them in the street. A lot.” He shifted slightly. “His horse just went down.”

Nobody said anything.

“He’s on foot now.” Glenn’s voice had gone careful and flat, just reporting. “He’s running. He’s going for—” He stopped. “There’s a tank. He’s going for the tank, there’s an abandoned tank sitting in the middle of Fifth and he’s heading straight for it.”

Merle was at his shoulder now, not grabbing the binoculars, just listening.

“He made it in,” Glenn said. “He’s inside.” He lowered the binoculars and looked at the hatch on top of the tank for a second, visible even from here. He brought them back up.

Then he reached over and picked up the radio from where Morales had set it on the wall.

He clicked it once. “Hey.” His voice came out easy, almost casual, like he was knocking on somebody’s door. “Hey you. Dumbass. in the tank.” A pause. “You comfy in there?”

The radio crackled.

We all looked at Glenn.

Glenn looked at the tank.

….

We heard them coming through the employee entrance before we saw them.

Footsteps, two sets, moving fast across the pavement behind the door before it banged open and Glenn rushed through first, breathing hard. The officer was behind him. Still in the uniform, which was the first thing I noticed, his tan shirt dark with sweat at the collar, a scrape along his jaw that was going to bruise.

Andrea came down the stairs from the mezzanine so fast I heard her boots on every step.

She had her gun out.

Not raised, but out, at her side, and the look on her face was the kind that made people take a step back without meaning to. Her jaw was set and her eyes were bright and sharp as she walked straight up to Rick and stopped close enough that he had to hold still.

“You,” she said, “almost got every single one of us killed.”

Rick opened his mouth.

“Don’t.” Her voice was flat and low, which was worse than if she’d been yelling. “One shot, that’s it, that’s all it took for you to ring the dinner bell, and now you trapped us in here. You sat in that tank and you fired in the middle of a dead city and now they know exactly where we are.”

The store had gone quiet around her. T-Dog on the stairs. Morales behind me. Jackie with her hand on my shoulder. I could hear the walkers from outside, faint through the glass, and if I was still enough, the low shuffling sound from the front doors.

Rick looked at her steadily. He didn’t flinch, which I noted.

“Andrea,” I said.

She didn’t look at me.

“Andrea.” I stepped up beside her, not between them, just beside her. “Shooting him isn’t going to make ‘em go away.”

“I’m not going to shoot him.”

“You’ve got your gun out.”

She looked down at it like she’d forgotten. She hadn’t forgotten. She put it back in her holster and crossed her arms and kept her eyes on Rick like she was deciding whether to be done with it or not.

“He didn’t know we were here,” I said. “He was in a tank. He couldn’t have known.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It kind of is though.”

She made a sound that wasn’t agreement but wasn’t argument either and took a step back and that was the end of it, or the end of that part of it.

She’d circle back to it later in her own head, I knew that, but she was done for now.

Glenn put a hand briefly on Rick’s arm and steered him further into the store and the rest of us followed.

Rick stopped when he saw the front doors.

There were a lot of them pressed up against the glass. That low shuffling sound I’d been hearing made sense now, all of them moving against each other in a slow directionless way, hands dragging across the door panels, faces turning toward the light.

The glass was holding. It wouldn’t hold forever and everyone in the building knew it, but it was holding right now and that was what we had.

Rick stood there and looked at them and didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“I haven’t seen that many,” he said finally. “Not all together like that.” His voice was quiet, not scared more like doing math in his head that wasn’t coming out to a number he recognized.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

He looked over at me. “Hospital,” he said. “King County. I was shot, came out of a coma and the place was empty.” He paused. “I found a man and his son squatting in my neighbors house. They took me in, showed me how to handle myself against them.” He looked back at the doors. “I thought I had a sense of how bad it was.”

“Well you didn’t,” Andrea said from behind us. No heat left in it now. Just fact.

“No,” Rick said. “I didn’t.”

The walkers pressed against the glass and the glass held and we all stood there in the department store light looking at them looking back at us.

….

We were halfway up the stairs when the first shot cracked through the building.

Everyone stopped. Rick’s hand went to his holster before he’d even finished turning around. Glenn looked at me and I looked at the ceiling like I could see through it to the roof and then another shot went off and we were all moving back up.

Merle was on the roof with the rifle.

He had it up at his shoulder, one eye closed, taking his time about it, and the sound of each shot was enormous up here in the open air, bouncing off the surrounding buildings and rolling out over the street below.

Down there the crowd at the doors was already thickening, heads turning, that horrible slow drift of bodies toward noise.

“Merle.” Morales voice was sharp. “Put it down.”

Merle fired again. Laughed at something only he found funny.

“Hey.” T-Dog moved toward him. “Hey, man, you need to stop. Right now. You’re pulling every one of them in the city down on us.”

Merle brought the rifle down and looked at T-Dog with disgust. “Boy,” he said, “I don’t remember asking you.”

The word landed like a stone in still water and everybody felt the ripple. T-Dog’s jaw tightened.

“Don’t,” T-Dog said. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Merle tilted his head. Grinning now. “I’m just talking. Man can’t talk?”

“You know what you’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Merle agreed, and the way he said it shifted everything. He set the butt of the rifle on the ground and leaned on it like a walking stick and looked around at all of us.

“Matter of fact I been knowing what I’m doing. Y’all been out here playing house, waiting on somebody to come tell you what’s next.” He looked back at T-Dog. “Wasn’t gonna be you.”

T-Dog stepped toward him and Merle moved fast for an old man. He got T-Dog by the front of the shirt and had him turned and down on one knee before anyone had fully registered it was happening, one forearm across the back of his neck, and T-Dog was big but Merle had the leverage and the angle and the particular viciousness of a man who had been in this kind of situation before and knew exactly how to end it.

“Get off him.” My voice came out hard. I didn’t move toward him. There was no point moving toward him. “He hasn’t done a single thing to you.”

Merle looked up at me from where he had T-Dog pinned and smiled like I’d said something charming.

“See that’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart.” He straightened up, keeping T-Dog down with one hand, and looked around the roof. “I been watching this little camp of yours. Waiting to see who was running things. Couldn’t figure it out.” He paused. “Then I figured out nobody was.” He picked the rifle back up with his free hand. Easy. Comfortable. “Was gonna let it go another week or two before I made my move. Didn’t expect to do it today but here we are.”

He let T-Dog go and brought the rifle up.

Not at anyone in particular. At all of us. Moving it slowly around the group the way you sweep a flashlight, unhurried, making sure everyone understood what it meant.

“So,” he said. “Anybody got a problem with how things are gonna work from here on out?”

Nobody said anything. Jackie had her hands pressed together in front of her mouth. Glenn had gone very still beside me. Andrea’s eyes were moving, calculating, and I could see her deciding whether the angle was right, whether she could get there in time, and deciding she couldn’t.

She really couldn’t, her safety was still on.

I looked at Rick.

He was already looking at Merle with focused attention, just waiting for the right second. I took one small step to the side. Out of his way.

Rick made his move.

He was fast and deliberate about it, he got inside Merle’s reach before the rifle could track him, one hand on the barrel pushing it wide, the other going to Merle’s wrist, and then Merle was turned and down and Rick had a knee in his back and the handcuffs out before Merle had finished cursing.

The cuffs clicked shut around the pipe running along the roof ledge.

Merle yanked against them once, hard, and the pipe held and he yanked again and it held again and then he just breathed, chest heaving, cheek against the rooftop.

Rick stood up. His jaw was tight but his hands were steady. He looked down at Merle for a moment, a look in his eyes that wasn’t satisfaction, and then he reached into his pocket and took out the handcuff key.

He looked over at T-Dog, who was back on his feet, rubbing the back of his neck.

Rick tossed him the key.

T-Dog caught it. Looked at it in his palm. Looked at Rick.

“For when we figure out what to do with him,” Rick said.

Merle said something ugly at the ground that nobody responded to. Down below us the street noise had gotten louder, that low collective sound that set my teeth on edge, more of them gathering at the building front, drawn by the shots.

I looked out over the edge of the roof at the street and then back at the group and thought, we need a plan and we need it fast, i looked at Rick because he seemed like the person most likely to have one.

….

The smell hit me before we even opened the door, I had braced for the smell but I wasn’t ready.

Rick had found a cart in the back storage room, one of the big flat ones they used for moving stock, and he’d pulled two walkers in from the alley, put them down himself.

Smart.

I wasn’t there yet but I understood the logic.

We stripped the aprons off the rack by the employee entrance and put them on over our clothes and Rick looked at us both and said, “Ready,” but it wasn’t really a question.

Glenn looked at me with an expression that was mostly brave and partially the face of someone trying very hard not to breathe through their nose.

The smell coming off them was something I didn’t have adequate words for. Hot garbage with sweet undertones. Skunk spray baked into something wet. I breathed through my mouth and it didn’t help because you could taste it, thick and coating, sitting on the back of your throat.

Rick handed me a length of intestine like he was passing me a tool.

I took it. I did tried my best not to think about it. I rubbed it across my forearms and the front of the apron and across the back of my neck and tried to be somewhere else in my mind entirely.

Glenn made a noise beside me.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I’m not,” he said, and then made the sound again.

We covered ourselves. It took about two minutes and felt like two hours. By the end of it we were dark with it across our shoulders and down our fronts, the smell so close that my eyes were watering.

Rick had it across his face and he wiped his hands on his thighs.

I turned around.

T-Dog was by the door. I pointed at him. “The key,” I said. “Don’t put it down. Don’t set it anywhere. It stays on your person.”

He held it up between two fingers so I could see it. “I got it.”

“With your life.”

“With my life,” he said, and I believed him.

I turned back to the door.

Rick pushed it open and the outside air came in, heavy and hot and humid and we walked out together, letting the door close behind us.

No turning back now.

Up close the noise was layered, not just the shuffling but the breathing, that wet ragged sound they all made, and the low occasional knock of them moving against each other. There were dozens of them between us and the fence. Dozens pressed together in the street and spilling out into the space beyond, all of them slow and directionless, drifting.

We walked right between them.

Slow. Eyes down. I kept my gaze on the pavement in front of my feet, the cracked asphalt, a flattened paper cup, a smear of something dark. I did not look up. I moved the way they moved, unhurried, no destination, just forward.

Rick was ahead of me and Glenn was just behind my left shoulder and I could hear him breathing and I wanted to tell him to slow down but I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t make a sound that wasn’t theirs.

One of them drifted close on my right and I felt the air shift when it moved past me. I kept my eyes down. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my jaw.

It kept moving. Didn’t stop.

I let out a breath so slow it was barely a breath at all.

We kept walking. The fence was maybe forty feet away. Thirty. I could see the chain link through the gaps between them, the parked cars sitting silent in the rain-gray afternoon light. Twenty-five feet.

The first drop hit the back of my hand.

I felt it and didn’t react. One drop. Could be anything. I kept walking.

The second drop hit my cheek. Then my shoulder. Then the pavement in front of me went dark with it in a spreading pattern and the smell around us shifted, that rot and copper smell thinning as the rain started coming down, and I felt Rick slow almost imperceptibly ahead of me.

Don’t, I thought at him. Don’t you dare stop. Keep walking.

He kept walking.

The rain got heavier. I could feel the guts on my forearms going slick, the apron front going wet and dark, everything we’d covered ourselves in loosening and starting to run. A walker two feet to my left turned its head.

Twenty feet.

The rain came down harder. Properly now, that Georgia rain that just arrives all at once, and I felt something slide off my shoulder and hit the pavement. Fuck. The walker to my left turned its head again and this time it was toward me and it was not nothing.

Fifteen feet.

I looked up.

The fence was right there. Rick was almost at it. Glenn was a half step behind me. The walker to my left gurgled low in its chest and took one step toward me and I looked at the fence and said, clear and flat, “Run.”

We ran.

The noise that went up behind us was immediate and enormous, that shrieking clatter of all of them turning at once. The fence was coming up fast and Rick hit it first and went up and over like he’d been doing it his whole life and I was right behind him, hands on the chain link, feet finding the gaps, climbing fast, don’t stop, don’t slow down.

Something grabbed my ankle.

Cold fingers, a grip like a hydraulic clamp, and my whole body jerked downward so hard my chin cracked against the fence. I kicked. Hard. Felt it connect and their grip loosened just enough that I could haul myself up and over. The pavement coming up to meet me fast and I came down on the other side, landing wrong, my left shoulder taking the brunt of the fall, white light going off behind my eyes.

I lay there for one second. Just one.

Then I looked for Glenn.

He wasn’t at the fence.

I scrambled up onto my knees, shoulder screaming, eyes tearing through the rain and the crowd pressed up against the chain link on the other side, dozens of hands and faces all reaching, all reaching, and no sign of him anywhere in it.

Rick’s hand was already out to pull me the rest of the way up and I grabbed it but I was still looking back through the fence, throat closing up around his name before I could even get it out.

“Glenn.”

Nothing.

“Glenn!”

And then I saw him, ten feet down the fence line where he must have come over further along, flat on his back in the wet grass on our side, chest heaving, rain running down his face in sheets, alive, completely alive

He pushed himself up onto his elbows, hair plastered flat to his forehead

“For the record,” he said, voice shaking just slightly under the joke, “you smell terrible.”

“Glenn.” My own voice came out cracked. I didn’t care.

“I’m just saying. Objectively.”

“Get the car,” Rick ordered, hiding his smile,

“On it.” Glenn scrambled upright, pointed at me with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. “You’re still very pretty though. In spite of everything.”

And then he was off, full sprint across the lot toward the vehicles, and I stood there in the rain and watched him go, my heart still going too hard, still not fully convinced he was real until I heard the Challenger’s engine catch.

Rick had the van keys in the driver’s side door and I went around to the passenger side and got in and pulled the door shut. Inside smelled like old upholstery and fast food wrappers and in comparison to what we’d just been wearing it smelled like a candle shop.

Rick started the engine.

The sound of the alarm rolled out over the street and I watched through the windshield as the crowd infront of the building began to turn, following the noise, following the loudest thing, exactly the way we needed them to.

Rick and I looked at each other.

We stripped off the aprons fast, rolling down the windows to toss them out into the rain, and I peeled off my outer layer and turned it inside out and shoved it behind the seat and sat back and wiped my face with the back of my wrist and felt slightly more like a human being.

The streets ahead of us were clearing.

My shoulder was going to hurt tomorrow but we made it.

….

The truck rattled to a stop at the edge of camp, tires crunching over gravel, and I was reaching for the passenger door before it had even fully settled.

My hands found the latch fast, muscle memory more than thought, and I hauled the back door open.

“Here, I got you.” I reached up for Jackie’s arm, her fingers cold and shaking in mine as she climbed down, legs wobbling like she’d forgotten how to use them. “Easy. I got you.”

She landed on the ground and just stood there for a second, chest heaving, eyes wet and unfocused like she couldn’t quite believe the ground was solid under her again.

T-Dog appeared at the edge of the truck bed above me, and even before he said anything I could see it on his face, something gone gray and hollowed out that hadn’t been there this morning.

“I dropped the key.” His voice came out low, cracked at the edges. “Wasn’t on purpose. I swear to God it wasn’t on purpose.”

“What key?” But I already knew before he answered, that cold drop in my stomach arriving a half second ahead of the words.

“Merle’s cuffs. I dropped it down the drain trying to get him loose and I couldn’t.” He wouldn’t look at me. “Had to leave him.”

I felt my mouth go dry. Not on purpose. I believed him, the way his hands were still shaking told me everything I needed to know about how it happened.

But Daryl wasn’t going to hear it that way.

Who knows if Daryl was going to take offense that a black man left his brother chained to a roof. If he was anything like Merle he’d draw his own conclusions long before he let anybody explain the difference between an accident and a choice.

“Okay.” It was all I could manage. “Okay, just, don’t say that to anyone yet. Let me be there when you tell him.”

He nodded, jaw tight, and climbed down after me.

The rest of camp was already moving toward us, Shane leading the charge with that loose walk of his, relief was written all over his face even as he tried to keep it casual.

“Look who made it back in one piece.” He clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to rock my body forward. “How the hell’d you get out of the city?”

Glenn was already laughing, that high, disbelieving laugh he got when the adrenaline hadn’t worn off yet. “You are not gonna believe it.” He looked back toward the truck, grinning. “New guy got us out.”

Morales was laughing too, shaking his head. “Some crazy vato who just got into town.” He waved toward the truck. “Hey helicopter boy! Come say hello.”

Rick climbed down out of the cab slow, boots hitting the dirt with a heaviness that didn’t match the frown still hanging around his mouth. His eyes swept the camp once, taking it all in, the people staring back at him like he was something they weren’t sure they believed yet.

Then his eyes found Shane.

Everything went quiet around them. Shane’s jaw shifted, just barely, a flicker behind his eyes. Rick just looked at him, steady, unreadable, the two of them frozen there for a beat that stretched longer than it should have.

“Dad!”

Carl came flying out from behind Lori, small legs pumping hard through the dirt, and whatever had been sitting heavy in the air between Rick and Shane broke apart all at once.

Rick dropped to his knees before Carl even reached him, arms already open, and the boy slammed into him so hard it nearly knocked them both backward. Rick’s face crumpled, all that steadiness we’d seen at the warehouse gone. Rick pressed his mouth to the top of Carl’s head and just held on, eyes shut tight, like if he let go even an inch the whole thing might not be real.

“I’ve got you,” I heard him say, muffled into Carl’s hair. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

Lori stood frozen for a second, hand pressed to her mouth, before she finally moved, crossing the space between them in a rush and dropping down into the both of them, arms wrapping around her husband and her son at the same time like she could fold the whole family back into one shape just by holding on tight enough.

I looked away, uncomfortable with how intimate the moment felt from where I stood.

My eyes found Shane instead. He was still standing where he’d stopped, watching the three of them. For a moment, before he could smooth his expression away, I caught something in it.

It looked a lot like grief.

….

Part 3

…

Tag list

I had been on the road for three weeks.

Arizona was good. Maybe even better than good. It beat every spot in Georgia I’d ever been to. The first few days I’d eaten at a diner in Sedona that reminded me of my favorite movie, the burgers were juicy and the pie crust shattered when I pressed my fork into it.

I’d hiked the Grand Canyon and listened to rain come down on the roof of my truck overlooking the cloudless sky at two in the morning and thought, this is it. This is the life.

Fort Valley looked exactly the same when I passed the welcome sign. That’s the thing i hated about small Georgia towns.

They never changed.

The peach water tower sat against a white sky, same as always. The dollar store on Moseley had a hand-lettered sign in the window I was pretty sure had been there since 2005. I drove past the ice cream shop I used to work in the summer and didn’t slow down.

Denise’s house was on a street shaded by old oaks, the ones that drop pollen in yellow clouds every spring and coat every surface in a fine green dust by May.

I pulled into her driveway, if you could even call it that and cut the engine. The truck ticked and cooled while I sat there a minute, hands still on the wheel, telling myself I could still turn around and go back.

I’d look like a coward but I’d be happy.

I grabbed my bag from the back seat. It smelled like sunscreen and the cedar air freshener I’d bought somewhere in New Mexico, and faintly of the fast food I’d eaten for the last four hundred miles.

The front door swung open before I could make it to the porch steps.

Gloria came outside.

She was one of Denise’s neighbors, a woman in her late sixties that used to watch us when we were kids. She donned a floral housecoat that I remember her wearing every time I’d ever seen her, or one exactly like it.

She had her arms out before she reached me, and the look on her face made my stomach drop before she said a word.

“Baby,” she said, and grabbed both my hands. Her palms were dry and warm. Her breath smelled like coffee. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

“What happened?” I said.

She didn’t answer right away, and that was its own answer.

“Your mama’s been real sick,” she said. “Real sick. We didn’t want to say it over the phone and worry you while you were traveling but I’ve been over here every day and she hasn’t been herself, she hasn’t been—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “She’s been asking for your daddy,” Gloria said. “On and off since yesterday.”

I left my bag on the porch steps.

The smell hit me the way it did when I still lived here as a kid. Fried food and old maple syrup that clung to the curtains and the baseboards. The porcelain dolls on the shelf over the TV watched me come in with their painted eyes, same as they always had.

“Denise?” I called out.

Nothing.

The TV was on in the kitchen, volume low, just noise. A news ticker ran across the bottom of the screen. Ranting about wildfire cases reported in three more counties. Officials urging residents to limit large gatherings.

Her bedroom door was mostly closed. I pushed it open with two fingers.

I covered my mouth and nose with the collar of my shirt and it didn’t help, it smelled rotten and wrong, like meat left in a car in July. “Jesus.”

Denise was on the bed, propped up against the pillows, hands flat on the quilt, eyes unfocused, not necessarily tracking anything.

There was a shallow basin on the dresser, water gone lukewarm, a cloth draped over the edge. Gloria had been in the middle of something when I called.

I wrung the cloth out after moving to the side of the bed and washed her hands first, working between her fingers, her skin loose and soft. Then her face, her neck, the inside of her elbows. She didn’t try to stop me. God knows she needed a bath.

She looked at the ceiling or past it, somewhere I wasn’t, and I ignored the distant look in her eyes. I worked in silence with the lamplight and those dolls at my back. It took everything in me to keep my breathing even and my hands moving because that was the only way to get past the smell.

“Patrick.”

Low and rough, dug up from somewhere. She was looking at the window.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice was steady. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for any of it. I never meant for it to get so far.”

I went very still.

She went on about the affair. How long it lasted even before he got sick. The money she’d moved without telling him. How she beat Nikki and I when we found out what she was doing.

She never once looked at me.

She said his name one more time, barely sound at all, and then she stopped.

I sat there.

It was over.

There was nothing I could do now so I got up and picked up the water glass and the tray with her pill bottles on it and carried everything downstairs to the kitchen. The stairs creaked in the same three spots and I didn’t avoid them this time. I set the tray in the sink, pills rattling against each other.

It was getting harder to breathe. I stood there with my hands braced on the counter and looked out the window towards the darkness. I had hated her for so many years even when her memory started slipping. Gloria told me she’d ask for me at night while I was on the road.

Even then I wasn’t ready to forgive her so I told Gloria to remind Denise she has no daughters, just a husband who was busy at work. That he’d be home soon.

I knew I needed to do something so I picked up the phone and tried the ambulance. Then 911. Then the non emergency number I still had in my phone from two when she’d fallen.

Busy. All of it. Every single line.

I stood in the kitchen pacing back and forth. Why was I even here? Why do I have to be the one handling this and not Nikki?

Just try again. I had the phone wedged against my ear, pacing a tight line between the kitchen and the living room while a recording told me all circuits were busy, “please try your call again later.”

Today can’t possibly get any worse.

Then something crashed upstairs, a heavy thud followed by glass breaking loud enough that I froze mid step. The phone slipped from my ear. I went completely still, my body fighting the urge to just run out the door. Instead I rushed toward the stairs taking them two at a time.

“Denise,” I called. My voice came out so small, weak, I needed to be stronger than that.

She turned her head toward me.

The whites in her eyes had gone the color of old paper. She didn’t even recognize me. She made the sound again and started to move, got one hand flat on the mattress and pushed. the smell rolled toward me like a wave.

I jerked away, heart beating so fast I could feel it in my ears, behind my eyes, in the tips of my fingers.

My shoulder hit the door frame.

She got off the bed.

She was slow about it. Unsteady. Pale feet skimming the floor until she stood, chin dropped, arms loose at her sides.

A beat passed before she rushed toward me.

“Stop. Hey.” My voice came out steady. I couldn’t explain how.

She didn’t stop.

I backed all the way into the hallway and she came barreling through the door after me and I was running away from the door. There was a wooden umbrella stand by the linen closet. I grabbed it without thinking, both hands, the wood smooth and cool and solid in my grip.

I swung it.

The wood connected with her head. She went down but didn’t stay down. I towered over her and breathed and waited until she started to move again. She jerked towards me and I hit her again, harder, right against her skull and she finally stopped.

I stood there in the hallway for maybe a minute. Long enough for my breathing to even out. Long enough to figure out an explanation to tell Gloria, who had been calling my name from somewhere outside.

I’m so fucked.

I set the umbrella down against the wall.

I need to get out of here.

I walked back to the front door and stepped out, the breeze cool against my arms where my mom’s blood started to harden. Gloria was standing at the foot of the porch steps with her hand pressed to her mouth.

I picked up my bag from the step.

“I need to borrow your phone,” I said.

…

My hands were shaking on the wheel when I dialed her number, dirt and blood still packed under my nails.

“Hey, you’ve reached Nikki, leave me something good.”

“Hey. It’s me. Call me back when you get this, okay? It’s about Denise.”

I pulled out of the driveway way too fast, gravel spitting up under the tires. My eyes kept cutting to the rearview like something might be coming up behind me even though I knew nothing was, not yet, not out here.

Prison.

If anybody found her like that and found me anywhere near it, that was the only word my head would give me. I needed to hear Nikki’s voice before anything else happened. One time. That was all I wanted.

I called again at the end of the road, phone pressed so hard against my ear it hurt.

“Hey, you’ve reached Nikki, leave me something good.”

“Nikki it’s me again. I need you to call me back. Something happened and I need to know where you and Eli are. I don’t know what to do right now. Please just call me.”

I turned onto the main road heading north, out of Fort Valley, my headlights swallowing the dark in front of me. I called again with one hand on the wheel, the other gripping so tight my knuckles ached.

Voicemail.

The radio clicked on by itself at the county line, the station I always saved for a long drive and for a second I almost smiled at the familiar crackle of it before I realized it wasn’t music coming through.

A mans voice drifted through the cab.

“This is an emergency broadcast message from the Civil Defense Network.

Residents are advised to remain calm and seek shelter at the nearest designated safe zone. Roads leading into Atlanta remain open.

Do not attempt to approach individuals who appear disoriented, injured, or unresponsive to verbal commands. If you encounter such an individual, do not engage. Leave the area immediately and proceed to the nearest shelter.

National Guard units are being deployed to major population centers, including Atlanta, effective immediately.

We will continue to broadcast on this frequency. Head toward the city.”

….

I woke up to knocking.

Gentle, unhurried and it clearly wasn’t planning to stop. I came up sideways off the window with my heart going and my hand finding nothing. The first thing I saw was a fishing hat through the glass and my heart began to slow down.

An older man. Round face, kind eyes, a thermos in one hand and a sleeve of crackers tucked under his arm, standing in the gray early morning light like he’d been there for a while and found it perfectly reasonable.

I cranked the window down.

His eyes went to my shirt for exactly one second and came back up to my face and stayed there.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said, and held the crackers through the window. “Dale Horvath,”

I took them waiting for the catch.

“I’ve got a Winnebago a few cars up.” He poured something from the thermos into the cap and held that through the window too, coffee, actual coffee, and the smell of it hit me so hard my eyes watered slightly.

“I’ve been talking to some of the people stuck out here. There’s a quarry off the highway, few miles back. Trees, water, some cover.” He looked out at the highway, at all the still cars and the pale morning coming in over the tree line. “It’s better than waiting here for whatever’s coming down that road.”

I tried the coffee. It was terrible but I didn’t care at all.

I looked at the crackers and at the highway stretched out in both directions. I didn’t have anywhere left to go.

“Yeah,” I said. “Alright, I’ll come.”

Dale nodded like that was exactly what he’d expected and picked up his thermos and headed back up the shoulder toward the Winnebago.

I watched him go before starting my truck.

….

I followed the convoy off the exit and down through the trees with my window cracked and the morning air coming in cool and green smelling, damp from the night, and I hummed some random song without thinking about it.

The quarry opened up through the tree line and it was bigger than I’d expected. Wide flat water sitting teal and still in the early light, rock shelves dropping down to it on the far side, pines ringing the whole thing in close and tall.

People were already pulling in around the edges, cutting engines, sitting in their cars for a minute before they got out.

I parked at the end of the line and sat there taking everything in. It wasn’t the worst place in the world to be. I’d lived in worse. Trailers, cars, even drug dens.

I turned the engine off and hopped out.

The first hour was uncomfortably silent. Nobody talked. They moved around each other carefully, keeping their distance and privately deciding whether this was a good idea or not.

I found a flat spot back across from the RV, good ground, enough tree cover to block the wind, and I set my bag down and stood there with my hands on my hips. I don’t even have a tent.

I had a deer blanket, a map, and a camera I’d taken from my mother’s house. I had my dad’s cd case in the front seat of my truck and a full tank of gas that was going to matter a lot less every day.

A hand appeared in my peripheral, holding a folded square of olive green nylon.

I turned. A man I didn’t know yet, gray at the temples, beady eyes, nodded toward the flat spot I’d been standing in. “Found an extra in the back of somebody’s wagon. Didn’t look like they were setting it up.”

“Thanks,” I said, and took it.

I patted the bag down for the manual, fingers digging into the corners, feeling for anything that felt like folded paper. Nothing.

“Great. No instructions.”

“It’s cold, right?” a woman questioned. I turned around to see two women had materialized behind me.

Where were these people coming from.

There girl behind her was beautiful, more my age from the look of it. They were both blonde, matching set of ice blue eyes, definitely sisters.

The older woman offered a tired smile, arms crossed against the chill already settling in. “Andrea,” she said, then nodded at the girl beside her. “My sister, Amy.”

“Are you by yourself?” Amy asked. I could tell she didn’t mean to be nosy just genuinely checking.

“For now.”

She nodded like she understood what I’d meant and didn’t push it. I decided I liked them.

I watched them both for a moment while they continued their conversation, Amy tucking herself against Andrea’s side without thinking.

“I think he’s been up since four.” She glanced back at Dale fondly. “He made oatmeal. I don’t know where he got oatmeal, I didn’t ask.”

Andrea’s arm went around her side.

I turned away and snatched the tent bag off the ground and dumped the poles out.

She’s out there somewhere in this mess. My sister had to be alive and I won’t accept otherwise until I see it for myself.

….

Shane Walsh had the look of someone who had been itching for a reason to be in charge. He stood proudly in the middle of the camp in his uniform, badge catching the morning light, and waited for people to notice him.

That didn’t take long because he was built and positioned in a way that made ignoring him require active effort which I don’t think anyone had left in them.

“Can I get everyone together for a minute.”

It wasn’t loud but it carried. People drifted in from the edges of camp, some still holding what they’d been unpacking, the woman with the folding chairs still had hers tucked under one arm. I stayed where I was near the tree line with the unassembled tent at my feet and my arms crossed and watched.

He let everyone settle.

“My name is Shane Walsh. I’m a sheriff’s deputy out of King County.”

“I know nobody here knows what’s coming next. I don’t either. What I do know is that the military is going to be moving through these areas and when they do they’re going to be looking for people, groups who’ve got themselves organized and aren’t a problem to extract.” He looked around the circle, taking in faces. “So that’s what we’re going to be. Organized. Not a problem.”

Somebody toward the back asked about Atlanta.

“Atlanta’s gone,” Shane said. Just like that. No softening. “We saw that ourselves last night. Whatever was in the city, it’s done. That means this is where we are and this is what we’re working with.” He looked around again. “We need shelter set up before dark. We need a food situation figured out. We need to know what everybody here can do and we need people willing to do it.” He paused.

“Anybody who wants to sit this out and wait for somebody else to handle it, that’s your choice. But I’d rather have you with us.”

The camp was quiet around him.

Nobody walked away.

Shane nodded once. “Alright. Let’s get to work.”

People moved with a direction that hadn’t been there before. I picked up the tent and figured out the poles by feel and had it standing in under fifteen minutes, which was a personal record and also the saddest thing I’d accomplished recently.

I stood back and looked at it.

A green tent barely big enough to lie flat in with a deer blanket and a travel bag inside. nothing else.

Home sweet home I guess.

I sat down in the entrance of it with my elbows on my knees and looked out at the camp coming together around me, people stringing lines between trees, a fire pit getting started somewhere to the left, Shane moving through it all with his badge checking things off a list only he could see.

The afternoon light was coming in warm through the pines now, hitting the quarry water and breaking apart into small flat pieces of brightness.

I watched it for a while.

I could’ve been in Arizona right now. I’d had a whole route planned, a folder in the backseat with campsites and a budget broken down by week. Five years of bartending shifts and insurance calls that didn’t work out and weekend waitressing, all of it pointed at that folder.

My dad would have definitely found this hilarious.

Amy appeared beside me with a tin cup and handed it over without ceremony.

“Dale’s oatmeal,” she said.

I looked at it. “Where did he get oatmeal.”

“I didn’t ask.”

I laughed. She dropped down into the tent beside me and pulled her knees up too. I wrapped both hands around the tin and let it warm them.

….

The laundry assignment came from none other than Shane, which Andrea did not find amusing.

“That’s what we’re doing,” she said, not quite a question. She was just staring at him deciding whether to keep her mouth shut or say the rest of what she was thinking.

“It needs doing,” Shane said, and moved on before she could respond, which was probably smart of him.

Andrea stood there for a second watching him walk away. Then she picked up the laundry bucket.

There were five of us down at the water’s edge by mid morning, the sun already warm across our shoulders, the quarry sitting flat and bright in front of us. Amy had claimed the best rock right away, wide and sloped, and was sorting through a pile of children’s clothing.

Carol was beside her, quiet, working through things methodically. Jackie had her sleeves rolled up and was doing the same. I found a spot a little further down and dropped my pile and dipped my hands in the water.

It was cold. The good kind, the kind that wakes you up properly.

Lori came down about twenty minutes later with Carl on her heels and a basket balanced against her hip. She set up between Andrea and Jackie and got to work without making an announcement about it, frustration clear on her face.

Carl lasted about four minutes before he found something more interesting happening elsewhere in camp and disappeared back up the bank.

“I’m Amy,” she announced to nobody in particular and everybody at once. “Andrea’s my sister. In case the bickering wasn’t enough of a hint.”

“We’re not bickering,” Andrea said from further up the bank.

Amy laughed, choosing to ignore the comment as if Andrea’s response proved her point.

“That’s not bickering, that’s processing.”

I looked up from what I was doing. Amy caught my eye and grinned.

“I’m Rum,” I said.

Lori’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a great name.”

“It’s a nickname.”

“Even better.” She wrung out something that had been a white shirt and was now more of a gray one and held it up to the light critically. “Where are you from?”

“Fort Valley. South of here.”

“Really?” She asked, genuinely surprised. “We lived in king county.” She dropped the shirt over a branch behind her.

“My dad worked over there, Grady memorial hospital. He was the janitor,” I admitted slightly embarrassed but she didn’t flinch. Lori just smiled sadly.

“My husband’s still there. He passed a few days ago.” She had her head down over the water, hair falling forward, the tears were silent.

“Carol,” she said quietly, to the water more than to us.

“I know,” Amy said warmly. “Sophia’s your little one, right? She’s sweet.”

Carol looked up at that, something moving across her face that was softer than anything I’d seen from her yet. “She is,” she said. Just that, just two words, but she meant them completely.

It was quiet for a little while, just the sound of water and wet fabric and the birds going in the pines. Amy was humming something I almost recognized.

“Does anybody actually believe it,” Jackie said.

Nobody answered right away.

“Believe what specifically,” Andrea said.

“That the military is coming.” Jackie kept her eyes on what she was doing. “That this is temporary. That we’re going to get extracted and go back to something.”

The quarry sat in front of us bright and indifferent.

“I think Shane believes it,” Lori said carefully.

“Shane needs people to stay calm,” Andrea said.

Lori scoffed at her. “He’s trying to help.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

“It sounded like you were about to.”

Amy picked up another shirt from her pile and said at normal volume to no one, “And we’re off.”

I kept my eyes on the water. Carol beside me had gone very focused on the hem she was working, fingers moving small and careful, and I had the feeling she spent a lot of time finding things to be very focused on when the air around her changed temperature.

“I think it helps to act like it’s true,” I said. “Even if you don’t know.”

Andrea looked down the bank at me.

“You’ve got to put your energy somewhere,” I defended. “Might as well put it toward something that could actually happen.”

“That’s optimistic,” Andrea said.

“I’m from fort valley,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of other options.”

Amy laughed, real and sudden, and it bounced off the quarry water and went up into the trees and Carol’s shoulders came up around her ears for a second before she let them back down, and when I looked over she was smiling at the shirt in her hands, actually smiling, and trying not to show it.

By the time the sun was overhead we had two lines strung between the trees heavy with wet things drying in the warm air, the smell of clean fabric mixing in with the cooked fish and the quarry water.

Amy was telling a story about a road trip she and Andrea had taken when they were younger that had gone wrong in about eleven consecutive ways and I was listening with my arms crossed and my face neutral. Trying but failing not to smile.

Carol was folding things into neat squares and stacking them on a dry rock, each corner matched up.

“You doing okay?” I asked, low enough that it was just for her.

She looked up. Her eyes were steady, steadier than I expected, and she looked at me for a moment deciding something. “I’m alright,” she said.

It wasn’t the whole truth and we both knew it. But it was what she had right now and I wasn’t going to push on it.

“Okay,” I said, and went back to the line.

The laundry dried in the afternoon sun. The camp kept building itself up the hill behind us. For today at least the world ending felt almost manageable.

….

Two weeks in and we had something that almost resembled a routine.

Mornings were for water and laundry and whatever needed doing before the heat got serious. Afternoons were slower, the camp settling into itself. Evenings were the fire.

That had started on its own, nobody really ‘planned’ them. Someone got a fire going the third night and people just drifted toward it how people always drift toward fire, pulling up whatever they had to sit on, and by the end of the week it was just what we did.

The sun went down and the fire went up like clockwork and for a couple hours nobody had to be useful.

I’d claimed a log at the left side of the pit that I sat on every night with my elbows on my knees and my cup of whatever was left from dinner.

Glenn had started sitting beside me, close enough to talk, far enough to maintain his dignity, which I respected. He brought things sometimes. An extra fish from the pan. A slightly better cup than the one I’d been using.

He never made a thing of it, just set it down and looked at the fire.

It was sweet. It was genuinely sweet and I felt bad about the fact that my eyes kept going across the fire to where Shane was sitting.

He wasn’t doing anything in particular to draw my attention. That was the thing that confused me. He was just there, elbows on his knees same as me, talking low to T-Dog about something, firelight catching the side of his face, and I’d look for a second and then look away at the fire and then somehow be looking over there again.

It was irritating. I was irritating myself.

Glenn said something beside me about a card game he wanted to organize and I said yeah that sounds good and meant it and kept my eyes on the fire so I wouldn’t have to look at either of them.

It was a good night. Warm, the frogs going down at the quarry, the fire snapping clean and dry, somebody’s radio playing low from across camp. I’d washed my hair that afternoon and it smelled like the travel soap I’d found in my bag, something with lavender in it or blueberry and lemon. I felt more like a person than I had since the highway.

T-Dog leaned forward and poked the fire and said, “Morales went out with his bow about an hour ago.”

“By himself?” Andrea asked.

“Said he knew what he was doing.”

Shane looked up from the conversation he’d been having and scanned the tree line automatically. His eyes darted around the perimeter and came back to the fire and he didn’t say anything out loud but I knew what he was thinking.

Glenn offered me the last biscuit from the cloth he’d been holding.

“Thanks,” I said, and took it.

He smiled at the fire.

We heard rustling in the trees before we saw them. Heard voices from the south trail, two maybe three sets of footsteps on the dry ground. Morales came through the tree line first with his hands slightly raised and a grin on his face that meant he’d done something worth seeing.

Behind him came the two brothers. “Found these two about a mile out,” Morales said. “They got a deer.”

The older man had the deer across his shoulders and he let it down and dropped it on the ground at the edge of the fire circle with a heavy thud that made Sophia flinch against Carol’s arm and made Carl’s eyes snap open all the way.

“Y’all look like you been eatin’ grass,” he said, cutting a grin around the circle. His eyes moved across faces, stopped on Andrea for a beat with something appreciative and not subtle about it, then kept going. “Lucky for you Dixon boys don’t miss.”

Lori was already on her feet. She had Carl by the shoulder, keeping him close, but her chin was up and her voice came out warm and clear. “We’re really grateful. Truly. That’s going to mean a lot to everybody here.”

He looked at her with mild surprise, like he’d expected someone to say something but not someone like her, and then gave her a nod. “Yes ma’am.”

“You’re welcome at this fire,” Dale said from his chair, steady and sure, like he was confirming what Lori had started. “As long as you continue to contribute. We could use it.”

I took a bite of Glenn’s biscuit. It was good. Carol made good biscuits and I was choosing to think about that instead.

….

Dale climbed down the side ladder a little before dark, moving carefully as to not break a hip. He crossed to where Andrea was sitting and she looked up from her book like she hadn’t already heard every footstep.

“Mosquitoes are getting bad tonight.” He produced a small bottle from his front pocket. some kind of oil, lemon-scented from where I was sitting. “Keeps them off better than the spray.”

Andrea looked at the bottle. Then at Dale. “And you just happened to have that.”

“I had a wife for twenty years. I’ve come prepared.” He said it simply, tone even but I could tell he was nervous.

She held out her arm.

He turned the bottle into his palm and worked the oil careful and unhurried across her wrist, then lathering her forearm and she watched him do it. I looked away before either of them could catch me watching.

That man is obsessed with her. She doesn’t stand a chance. Just wait until Amy hears this.

….

The fire light was already going orange by the time I noticed the deer strung up near the tree line, and I wandered over mostly because I didn’t want to sit through the quiet anymore.

Dale had Andrea settled by the fire pit still and the two of them had that look people get when they want to be left alone without having to say it out loud.

Daryl had the deer half open already. I could smell the blood from a few feet off, intense copper, wet leaves maybe, or just the ground itself after a day of heat. He didn’t look up when I got close. Just kept working the knife along the inside of the hide, slow and even, like he’d done it a thousand times and didn’t need to think about where his hands were going.

“You gonna stand there or you gonna help.”

It wasn’t really a question. I crossed my arms and watched him for a second before I answered.

“Didn’t realize I was invited.”

“Wasn’t an invitation.” He finally glanced up, just enough for me to catch the unamused look on his face. “Was an order.”

I laughed.

He had a voice that came out clipped no matter what he said, the exact opposite of invitation. But I crouched down across from him anyway, close enough to feel the heat still coming off the carcass.

“Fine. Boss me around then.”

He huffed through his nose, something close to a laugh he wasn’t going to give me credit for, and held the knife out handle first.

“Grab it here.” He showed me with his own hand first, fingers wrapped low near the guard. “You cut too high you’ll nick the stomach and then ain’t nobody eating tomorrow.”

I took the knife. It was heavier than I expected, the wood of the handle worn smooth in the middle from however many hands held it before mine. He reached over and adjusted my grip without asking, just took my wrist and moved it down an inch.

his hands were rough and dry against my skin, calloused enough around the edges that told me everything about how he’d spent his life before this one.

“Just like that. Now follow the line I started. Don’t saw at it. Let the blade do the work.”

I did what he said. The hide gave easier than I thought it would, a soft tearing sound under the blade, almost like fabric. The smell got stronger the deeper I went, thick and mineral, and somewhere under it I caught pine from the trees behind us and woodsmoke drifting over from the fire.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Hunted some when I was younger. Nothing this big though.” That part was true. Mostly squirrel and rabbit, things small enough that my daddy used to let me carry home myself, proud of it the whole walk back.

Daryl made a sound that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite doubt either. He took the knife back from me when I got stuck near the hindquarter, showed me where to angle it, just nudging my hand the direction it needed to go.

His patience surprised me. Not at all gentle but I could tell nothing about him was gentle. he wasn’t barking at me either, not after that first order.

He spoke low, almost to himself half the time, narrating what he was doing more than actually teaching it, like he forgot I was there to learn and not just there.

“You’re better at this than your buddy morales,” he said at one point, not looking at me. “Boy couldn’t gut a fish without flinching.”

“Didn’t realize you were keeping score.”

“Ain’t scoring nothing. Just saying what I see.”

The fire popped behind us and somewhere further off I heard Carol calling Sophia in for the night, gentle as ever.

Daryl’s jaw tightened at the sound, just slightly, like he heard something in it too, but he didn’t say anything about it. He went back to the deer instead, hands moving fast now that the light was almost gone, working by feel more than sight.

When we finished he wiped the blade on his jeans and held it out to me again.

“Keep it.”

I looked at him, waiting for the catch.

“I got others.” He was already standing, already turning toward the fire. “Just don’t lose it. And don’t go cutting yourself being stupid with it either.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He grunted something that could’ve been a laugh and walked off without looking back, and I stood there for a second with the knife warm in my hand from where his fingers had been on it, smelling like blood and smoke.

I didn’t know what to make of him yet. Rude in a way that didn’t apologize for itself, short with everyone, and still somehow the only person at that camp who’d handed me something instead of just talking at me. And insanely hot.

I tucked the knife into my belt and headed back toward my tent.

The tent was hot even with the flap tied back, that thick canvas smell mixed with the bug spray Amy kept passing around like it was perfume.

I lay on top of my sleeping bag because it was too warm to get inside it, listening to the camp settle down around me, crickets going steady in the dark, and somewhere further off the quarry water lapping against the rocks.

I had the knife out, turning it over in my hands, getting used to the weight of it, even running my thumb along the flat of the blade where it had gone dull and gray from however many years of use.

The handle was wood, dark with oil and sweat worked into the grain, and it was smoother on one side than the other, like it had been carried in a pocket more than a sheath.

That’s when I felt it. Three letters cut into the underside of the handle, shallow, like whoever did it didn’t have much more than a pocketknife and patience to work with.

WTD.

I held it up closer, angling it toward the lantern light coming through the tent wall from somewhere outside.

Definitely letters, not just scratches from wear.

Daryl Dixon. The D made sense. But the W.T I couldn’t place. He didn’t strike me as a man with a middle name he’d go out of his way to carve into a knife handle. Merle had a few names for their father and none of them sounded like the kind of man who carved initials into anything except maybe somebody’s face.

I turned it over again, like I might’ve missed something the first time, but it was just the two letters and nothing else. No date, no other mark.

I set it down next to my pillow and lay back.

I wasn’t going to ask him in front of everybody. He’d shut down quick if I put him on the spot but next time it was just the two of us, whatever excuse got us alone again, I was going to ask him.

Everybody at this camp had a story they weren’t telling. I figured his was worth knowing.

….