A Good Man
1. Laid Low
His fingers slid across the ice cold body of her gun. It bypassed either of their hands and fell to the frost below. Mike held her gaze, smiling weakly.
"It's fine, just -"
That gunshot roared out in the night and it plunged the whole snow-covered gully into ruin and wretchedness.
"No!" Mike's voice tore from his throat and his smile rotted away.
A high-pitched yelp ruptured her lips. She grabbed at her shoulder with trembling little fingers. Her pupils shrank into pinpricks as she watched the blood spurt from the creases between her fingers and splatter across the plush white snow. Clementine's chest rose and rose and rose. She stared unseeingly down at the display of crimson snow. Blood dribbled from under her palm, irretrievably warm against the winter all around her. She widened her mouth and took a gulp of air before she tumbled back onto the ground.
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears and behind her eyes. She stared so emptily ahead. Her shoulder was numb. A throbbing, rhythmic pain undulated in and out from her punctured flesh. She gasped. Her fingers curled into the thickness of her jacket. The horrible warmth began to pool beneath her, she could feel it in her ear.
"Oh my God," That woman whimpered, "Clem. Clem!"
Mike wound his fingers around her arm, as terrified as he had ever been.
"Bonnie," he pleaded, "We have to go."
She wrenched her arm from his grasp and soured her eyes upon him. "Don't you touch me."
Bonnie sank onto her knees. She kneeled before the injured girl, unsure of what to do with her hands. She frowned bitterly at the shock and confusion on the poor thing's face. She tightened her lip. Her shoulders sank. She had been so wrong.
"I-I'm so sorry," Bonnie's voice trembled, "I...I didn't mean for this to happen."
"Oh my God, Clem."
Her eyes reeled up toward the porch. The woman found her footing, stumbled a little back onto her heels. A narrow brook of wetness crept down her cheek. Her chest felt empty as she watched Kenny's imposing frame stop for an instant at the doorway. His handgun caught the moonlight and it twinkled up at her in the dark.
"What the fuck did you do?" the man barked.
Jane emerged from the open doors shortly after him, her pistol locked between her hands.
Bonnie stole a step or two back. She bumped into Mike with the whole of one of her shoulders, then glanced to him before she was able to look back at Kenny.
He thundered down the stout flight of stairs. His arms were spread offensively out at his side, his gait broad. In the obscurity of night, they could see the fear scrawled upon his face. His brows, thick and weighty, furrowed under the creases in his forehead. His eyes were gentle as he saw her laying there, alone.
"Clem," he said as though he'd been struck suddenly and remorselessly in the gut.
He dug his boots into the snow, then glared back up at Bonnie and Mike. Something like confusion played on his face.
"What did you do?" he roared mightily. He stooped at the girl's side. "Clem…"
Kenny cupped his empty hand under her cheek and tilted Clementine's face from the cold. He scoured her eyes desperately, his mouth wide and the words forever failing him. His arm steepled between her still, slack little shoulders and he scooped her upper body into his lap. She stared vacantly up into nothing. Kenny grew frantic.
"Clem!" the man shouted. Then he turned his ear against her lips.
Shallow breaths met his skin, and his wide old shoulders fell.
Kenny motioned Jane over and placed her hands firmly onto Clementine's shoulder. He brandished his pistol and stole nearer to the two monsters before him. They raised their open palms to the stars.
Bonnie fought for the breath she hadn't realized she'd lost.
"Who was it?" the man's words dripped between closed teeth, "Tell me right goddamn now which one a' y'all motherfuckin' snakes did this."
"Kenny, hear me out. He...he's just a kid. He was - fuck, he was scared." The plea spilled from Mike's open mouth like bile from the pit of his stomach.
"Arvo? I fuckin' knew it," Kenny cursed. His eye scanned the treeline. "Where is he? Where the hell did he -"
His eye widened. In the solemn dun of the dark, his mournful eye reflected the whole of the moon. Kenny's lips peeled back and he bore his teeth with a snarl. He took off into the snow, his crosshairs centered on the fleeing boy. The wheeze of scraping metal danced off the thousandfold tree trunks.
"Kenny, no!" Mike protested. He sprinted after him.
"Jesus Christ," Bonnie wept, "This ain't what we wanted at all, God, you have to -"
"Shut up." Jane reprimanded her from the ground.
She clasped one palm over another and dug the heel of her hand against the seeping hole in Clementine's chest. Her callous stare flit between the girl's face and Bonnie's. A heavy scowl lay upon a cursing mouth.
"Bonnie, just shut the fuck up and bring me the med kit," she ordered shortly. Jane jerked her head toward the duffel bag lying a few feet away. "I know you took it."
Bonnie trudged toward the bag, guilt smeared across her face.
"Things just went wrong, man!" Mike huffed as he staggered to maintain his balance.
"My ass, they went wrong!" Kenny spat thoughtlessly to the breeze, "I'll kill 'im, Mike. I'll fuckin' kill 'im!"
Arvo stopped short of the grassy ridge nestled between the plain and the pines. The tractionless soles of his sneakers slid upon frosted blades of grass. He extended one hand to steady himself. He cast a cautious eye over his shoulder and yelped. He bent his knees and, however wobbly, did not fall.
"You! You stay away!" The boy hollered.
The rifle swung wildly in the bed of his palm.
Kenny maintained his pursuit. "You got'cherself a big gun - think yer callin' the shots now, huh, shitbird?"
"Stay away!" He reiterated.
Arvo glanced between the maw of Kenny's gun and the gorge under his heels. He pinched his brow. His lips stiffened against grated teeth. He swiveled back for the forest.
Kenny's nostrils flared as he conjured a breath up from the depths of his chest. He halted in place, forked his legs into a wide stance. He watched the boy's frame from the motionless barrel pistol barrel in his fist. He growled. His fingertip hugged the trigger. The bullet spewed from his weapon in an explosion of light and chilling sound.
Arvo tossed his head heavenward and choked on his words. Shrapnel pierced his kneecap and rent his skin before the sound had even reached his ears. He collapsed. His body stalled an instant, and he tumbled down the divot in the earth.
Kenny strode ahead a pace or four, and rode the slope on the ridges of his boots. He skidded to a stop as the soil evened and the darkness enveloped most of the forest floor. He cocked the handgun again and stalked toward Arvo.
"Don't...D-Do not touch me!"
The boy laid flat upon his stomach. His wounded leg frayed out on the ground at an awkward angle while the other retained a mechanical straightness between either of his metal splints. Arvo winced and attempted to roll unto his arm. Kenny's heel pressed down upon the bullet hole in the back of his knee. He screamed. Blood streaked across his cheek as he scraped his face against the ground in agony.
Kenny propped his elbow up on his thigh and knelt forward. Nearer, he leant toward the heap beneath his foot.
"No fuckin' promises, asshole." the words grazed Arvo's ear after an eternity on the crisp night's wind.
The vengeful man shifted. He concentrated all his weight, all his trouble, all of the hurt and the exhaustion of his strong body into the sole of his foot. He jammed it down upon the seeping chasm of torn and bleeding flesh. He curled his toes and pressed them into the dense flats of his shoes. His mouth was unsmiling beneath the coarse whiskers on his upper lip as the boy wriggled and swore, dug his fingers in the dirt.
How that boy screamed. Silhouettes of feathered little angels streaked across the blue-black blanket of the night. Blackbird cries of distress and unrest commingled with the muffled screams of a boy who'd done wrong. Clumps of snow rained down from the canopy and onto some bigger, lowlier branches in the thickness of it all.
His glasses cracked as he drove his brow into the ground. He ventured his hand out blindly, fishing with quaking fingers for the rifle that had earned him bullet, blood, and splintered bone. Kenny stowed his pistol and hefted the weighty thing up from the topsoil.
Arvo's heart hammered away under every inch of his skin. Licks of sweat trickled across a galaxy of goosebumps.
"No," he contested, his voice tired but defiant, "You not shoot!"
"Sounds to me like you think you got a say."
He cranked back the hammer. A mechanical click lit up the night.
Arvo struggled.
Kenny leveled the gun at the back of his sorry skull. "How much, exactly, you think my girl's life is worth? Your knee?"
The dense ridges of his boot grated against the inflamed puncture in Arvo's leg. Kenny punched down on the boy with his foot.
Arvo wriggled and tossed. His mouth was wide and the tendons in his neck tensed harshly against his skin. He jerked his head upright and tears spilled from the dark and tired corners of his eyes. But there was no sound. There was a deafening silence, there, for a moment, as he struggled to inhale or exhale, either way. His lungs stung. His larynx swole shut and his face turned red.
Kenny ground his foot ever more into that busted leg.
"Your fuckin' knee?" He hollered, and the man's voice broke, "Is that what you think?"
He could see her laying there in the cold and inhospitable night, her eyes wide and dull. Motionless, save for the erratic bobbing of her chest. Barely breathing, he could see her silent pleas for peace. He could see those girlish curls of hers soaking in her own blood. He could see the lack of focus in her gaze as he looked down at her on his knees. His grimace sank further against his cheeks.
Lee's girl.
He sucked in a breath and condemned the telltale stinging of his eyes. He dug a little deeper with his boot.
Mike slid down the embankment, fumbling at the last moment. He swallowed a gasp. His bones raked against each other. One foot swiveled in an errant direction. His flesh conceded. Beneath a layer of denim, his skin incarnadined in a sanguine plume of dark purple and red. He peeled his lip under his teeth, biting back a wince.
The man baltered gracelessly from foot to foot until straightening his back. He watched Kenny tower over the weak body wedged between his boot and the soil. He busied his hands with the slender neck of a hunting rifle, the broad end caught in the crook of his arm. He crushed his foot down each and every time Arvo so much as flinched.
The boy narrowed his eyes up at him. Hatred anchored the corners of his mouth. "You! You say he not hurt me!"
Kenny trained his eye on the back of Arvo's head. Mike strode up on his flank.
"Kenny, what the hell're you doing? Get off of 'im!"
"I ain't had much patience to begin with, you little shit. Tell me right now why I ain't ought to pull this trigger and leave you a fuckin' stain on the ground."
Mike interjected, "This ain't the way to-"
"Answer me!" The man's voice overpowered his.
"You kill Natasha," Arvo muttered, "I kill little girl."
Fine creases arose on Kenny's forehead. His eyes widened. For a moment, quiet overtook him and a wave of dread encompassed the clearing. He could feel Mike's eyes watching him warily.
He didn't care.
"What did you say?" there was something cautionary in Kenny's voice, "What the fuck did you just say?"
"I fucking kill her!"
Driblets of saliva spewed from Arvo's open mouth as he shifted on his side to face the man.
There was silence for the better half of an instant as their eyes locked and the wind blew. The cold drew the pinkness from their skin. Dawn's first birdsong twittered out from somewhere deep in the belly of the forest.
"You evil crippled fuck!"
Kenny raised his arms and beat the boy's cheek in with the butt of a rifle. He clamped his eyes shut and knotted his brows as tightly as his flesh would stretch. The dull impact of machinery against meat resounded with heavy, discordant thuds. Scarlet pulp and thick globs of blood and gore flecked against their clothes and the snow and the dirt. He razed away at the boy as hot moisture dribbled from the compressed wrinkles at either ends of his eyes.
Thin fingernails hooked blindly into the fabric of Kenny's jeans. Arvo uttered half a scream before the next blow knocked some silence into him.
"No, damn it!" Mike shouted, and he threw himself onto the man.
They tumbled out onto the slush. The gun flew from Kenny's grasp and somewhere into the unseen throes of the forest floor. Mike's ankle nearly snapped. He wheezed and gasped, thoughtlessly reaching for the manhandled skin that ailed him.
Kenny seethed and shoved the man away.
"Damn you!" he roared as he dragged his coat sleeve across his face, "You heard 'im! I know you heard 'im! How the fuck can you still defend 'im?"
"I'm not defending what he did, Kenny! I'm just as horrified as you - I never wanted him to shoot anybody!"
"Then what the fuck'd you give 'im a gun for?"
"In case a walker cropped up, Kenny, Jesus Christ! He shot a little girl, I know, Ken, I was there. But what the hell am I s'posed to do when I see you torturing a kid?"
"He ain't just a kid, an' that's not just 'a little girl', damn you!" Kenny shrieked and raised his fist, "That's Clementine you're talkin' about! And you...you were just gonna leave her!"
Mike flinched, but the strike never came.
Kenny's expression was mad with sorrow and rage. "You let 'er get shot an' you were gonna leave her for goddamn dead, Mike, you son of a bitch! And for what? The truck I fuckin' salvaged and the supplies we need to keep that baby alive! Your endgame was to fucking murder two kids? Was that it?"
"No! Never! I just...we needed to get out and -"
"Fuck you, Mike!" the man spoke as though an immovable welt had formed in his throat. Rills of saline streamed down either sides of his face. "Those kids are everything to me and you damn well know it. You were my friend. You were my fuckin' friend."
"Jesus, Ken, I -"
The click of an empty magazine bounded off the pines. With a bloody fingernail barely hanging from the flesh, Arvo pulled at a forsaken trigger. The frames of his glasses were mangled. The piping had snapped on one ear and the neatly molded squares round his eyes had been beaten hideously out of shape. A sliver of glass, opaque with blood smear, jutted out from his cheek. His eyes were obscured by red and swollen skin. Bruises yellowed under starglow. He stared down the lengthy nose of the barrel at Mike, snagged perpetually between his crosshairs.
Mike rolled onto his haunches and just stared across the snow at the boy he'd tried to save.
Kenny glowered between them, laid silent for the moment.
"Arvo." Mike exhaled with some degree of finality.
"Liar," the boy wheezed back between two busted lips.
"Thank fuck I thought to empty the shells, then, huh?" Kenny remarked humorlessly.
The man pressed his palm flat against his knee and rose above the fallen. He fished around in his jacket pocket and produced a handful of bullets. He met Mike's eye for a fraction of an instant.
"That's what you risked everything for. Feel worth it, yet?"
He tilted his cupped hand and emptied it onto the ground.
The ambient undead were approaching. The stench of rancid meat singed his nostrils. Kenny turned for the hill.
"Kenny, you can't just - I-I don't have a gun!" Mike dragged himself across the snow after him.
"Neither did Clementine."
The man tangled his fists in a mess of roots spilling out of the soil. He peered up at the remnants of twilight through one eye. He breached the burning of his empty old lungs and savored the breath he didn't have to fight for. Kenny stayed there, a minute. He let walkers' moaning and wheezing wash out the sound of Mike's pleas and the muffled damnation tumbling free off Arvo's tongue. He let disaster splash against his ears as he scaled the embankment on his own. He thought, a moment, that he might glimpse back down. He flared his nostrils and shook his head.
They began screaming the screams that peel back the layers of the soul. The kind of screams that blur the vision and skin the throat. The kind of screams that don't elicit any questions. The kind of screams a good man might run toward, with hope in his heart and righteousness packed into the barrel of his gun.
But Kenny knew better. He hauled himself up.
Author's Note: I should really, really be updating some of my other works right now, but I had to get my frustrations with Arvo out somehow. This may turn into a series of drabbles pertaining to Kenny Ken Ken and his kids (Clem, AJ). Then again, it may not go anywhere. Regardless, please enjoy! I encourage you to leave me feedback, follow or favorite - do what you will. Thanks so very much for your intrigue and your thoughts. It means the world.
Disclaimer: I don't own nor do I claim ownership of any of the above material. Kenny, Clem, AJ, and all of the other Walking Dead Game crew are copyrighted to Telltale Games, Skybound Entertainment, and Robert Kirkman and friends and all of the other lovelies associated with The Walking Dead. I do, however, own my prose, and will not tolerate plagiarism.