Mightiest of Guns

Author's Note:

Title is from a song by the beautiful American folk artist AA Bondy. Reviews are always appreciated! Will be doing my best to update regularly but as any other university students can attest for, it's not always easy. I'm really liking the direction of this one so far. Possibilities feel endless! Obviously I don't own TWD or Daryl Dixon's likeness (though we all wish we did). Enjoy! xxx

You liked your coffee black. With one ice cube. You could always guess what track the train was going to arrive on. You took piano lessons until you got frustrated and quit. You lost your virginity to Malcolm Gallagher, remember him? He had those heavy lidded eyes you always liked. Made him look like he was always missing sleep. You imagined he stayed awake reading the kind of books you liked..

Reciting facts about herself, as though revising for an exam. Holding on to all the little bits of her to keep them from slipping away. The quirks and desires and memories that day by day were becoming more and more irrelevant. Trying to hold onto anything to keep her from turning into another empty, primal, survivalist machine.

Kristen McCoy lay awake, sprawled across the back of her '96 Buick Roadmaster. Two bodies flanked her on either side. Val's head resting on her chest, the little girl's hand clenched fiercely around Kristen's sweater. She had left her favorite stuffed animal at home. Leave it to a child to be faced with the end of the world and be more concerned about a stuffed cat. At least Val was finally sleeping.

Liam on the other hand was restless. Sleeping head to foot with the girls, his feet were burrowed under Kristen's left arm. He had come dangerously close to kicking her in the chin several times during the night. Kristen didn't know if it was physical discomfort or fear that kept her younger brother awake but her heart ached with each of his little jerking movements.

In the front seat Sean didn't even make an attempt to sleep. The eldest boy left in the family, he had taken on some kind of patriarchic protectiveness. The bat lay in the seat beside him. The gun in his lap. Kristen still didn't know where he had gotten the gun. The weapon had made it's appearance as suddenly as all of this trouble had. She didn't know where he had learned to hold and shoot it. She didn't want to know.

Sean was smart. Too smart for his own good. But he was also a dangerous combination of reckless and fearless. Kristen had done her best with him. Always made sure that he had (most) of his homework done. Made sure that he made it to school clean and fed. But when it came to discipline, she found that she couldn't scold him the way she could the younger children. She only had five years on him and no 20 year old boy is going to jump at the chance to listen to his 25 year old sister. And to her shame, when the bills were late or Val's birthday was coming up, and Sean came home with large amounts of suspicious cash - she'd just shut up and take it gratefully.

Kristen moved ever so slightly to a more inclined position. Val stirred against her chest but didn't wake. Her grip on Kristen's sweater tightened. Kristen's voice was slight and soft but she knew that the sound would drift over to her brother. He was too alert to possibly not catch her words.

"Seany, how does it look out there?"

He replied without looking at her, keeping his eyes on the horizon. "The coast looks pretty clear. Too many goddamn people around here though. It's making me jumpy."

Kristen nodded silently. The four of them were almost more wary of the other survivors than they were of those…things. When things had started to take a turn for the worse, chaos broke out in their lower-class Boston neighborhood. People turned on each other, robbing and looting those who had previously been friend and neighbor. Someone had smashed in the windows of their little duplex for reasons that Kristen would never fully understand. Everyone in the neighborhood knew well enough that her family wouldn't have anything worth looting. If anything, the neighbors were afraid that the family's impoverished state would lead them to desperation, crime, violence.

Kristen couldn't blame them. Her family's reputation wasn't the brightest in their Southside neighborhood. 'Classic American white trash of the New England variety.' Her father used to call them that with a perverse sense of pride. Hold his tallboy in the air and drink a toast to the peeling wallpaper and musty furniture of their dilapidated home.

Sean and Liam's father had been ashamed of their poverty. He had done his best to try and fix up the ramshackled home. There was a still a half finished addition off the back porch. When his time to leave came, he took his tools with him. The only remnants of his existence: a half painted hallway and some unfinished drywall. And obviously Sean and Liam.

They had never met Val's father. All she knew was that he was an Italian. Where Val got her rich dark hair and her brown eyes. Her lovely name, Valentina. Kristen was 17 when Val was born. She would hold her up, look in those big brown eyes, and say her name over and over. Valentina. Val En Tine Ah. Like every syllable was the line in a poem. Valley Girl, Tiny Tina, Val. She was the love of Kristen's life.

Sean and Liam were the product of good old Irish Catholic, Boston blood. Bright blue eyes, smatterings of freckles, red copper hair and redder tempers to match. Kristen had really thought that when her mother brought their father home that it was going to last. She had tricked herself into feeling some security. The man was even kind to her. When things inevitably fell apart and the family was in even greater shambles than before, she promised to not make that mistake again.

Her own father had been a German man. A rail mechanic, he had been very skilled with his hands. Especially when he was using them to crack open a beer or count out his paychecks at the races. His German efficiency. Kristen was four when he left. Eight when he stopped calling or visiting. Still, sometimes she still recognized traces of him within her. Her golden brown hair, her long fingers, her strongly Germanic name. She was nine when she took on her mother's last name. In a school of Irish Catholics, Kristen Wilhemina Weber made her the butt of more than one cruel joke. She wanted the same last name as her siblings.

Mother. A dark and selfish part of Kristen's mind was grateful that her mother wasn't here for this. Manipulative, needy, selfish, emotionally unstable and chemically dependent. Maura McCoy would be nothing but trouble in these times. A volatile element, distracting Kristen from protecting the kids. Her kids.

They were strangely apt with dealing with the chaos of the world now. When the news reports and neighborhood rumor mill made it obvious that it was time to clear out of the populous neighborhood, Liam and Val had packed up without any hesitation. Without any tears or moaning. They were used to it. Countless times, Kristen had made them do the same thing. Packed them in the back of this same station wagon, weighed down with toys and sleeping bags. Impromptu camping trips whenever she got a tip that child services was planning a visit. Anything to keep the family together. Kristen, Sean, and Liam had all spent a few dark months in foster care while Maura was in and out of rehab for the third time. It was something that Kristen was desperate to spare Val.

Her thoughts turned back to Maura. Kristen doubted that Maura was still alive. With Maura hooked on methamphetamines and prescription pills, Kristen had spent her teen years trying to keep track of her brothers. Help them with their homework, try to feed them the freshest food their foodstamps would allow. When Maura came home pregnant one night, Kristen made it her mission to ensure the baby be born healthy. Daily, she'd replace her mother's pills with prenatal vitamins. Things had calmed down after Val's birth. Maura was even staying clean all through the nursing period. Then one night she went out. Coming out of a particularly good high, she decided another baby just wasn't what she wanted.

The nursing stopped, Val's diaper went unchanged. Kristen missed her senior year of high school having to take care of the baby. All of Sean's money went towards formula.

One day Liam got himself sent to the principal's office for getting into a fight. His punishment was immediate suspension. Sean was working and Maura had lost her license after a DUI. Kristen rushed out to pick him up, leaving Baby Val with an uncharacteristically subdued Maura. A ten-minute trip, she thought the napping baby would be fine. They came home to find Maura strung out and laughing to herself on the floor. Val crying, bundled up in a laundry basket, balanced precariously on the ledge of the open second story window. Liam flew across the room to grab his little sister. Kristen went into a rage, barely stopping herself from kicking her mother on the ground.

That day she made Maura leave for good. The woman barely even put up a fight. She protested at first over the rights to the house but the deed was still in the name of Christoph Weber. If anything, the house was Kristen's.

For the first few weeks, Kristen found herself guiltily watching the news every night for any sign of her mother. She'd call the same hospitals, asking if any women were brought in for overdoses, just as she and Sean had done when Maura was a regular in their lives. She'd ask around the neighborhood, the men she knew her mother screwed around with. The men she knew doped her mother up. It seemed that nobody had heard from Maura McCoy. One night, on her way to work, she spotted her mother in the booth of a 24-hour Waffle House. Kristen tentatively entered the restaurant and sat across from her mother. The woman stared right through her, her eyes sunken in - her expression hollowed. Kristen reached into her purse, paid her mother's check, and left.

It was the last time any of the McCoys had seen their mother.

After that, their little family unit had grown closer knit. Val grew into a happy and healthy kid, Liam into a troublesome but kind teenager and Sean into a strong willed young man. Kristen grew into the polar opposite of her parents. She got her GED and worked nights as a barmaid, getting little sleep during the day as she kept the house and cooked and cleaned. Got the kids from school. Took Val to Girl Scouts. Taught her to bake cookies and nurse her teddy bear's wounds.

They had to scrimp and save every day to get by. Liam had to work after school to help with the bills. Sean had to put any college plans on hold to work full time. Kristen had to invest in a few pushup bras and flirt her darndest with the male bar patrons to keep her tips high. But with the help of a few close friends, neighbors, and of course one another - they always made it through.

That was why when news reports started coming through about some strange infectious disease, one that made people irrational and violent, Kristen wasn't too worried about it. The McCoy kids had been around enough junkies in their short lives to not be too fazed by the irrational and violent.

It wasn't until the habits of her most devoutly alcoholic bar patrons changed that she began to fear that something was seriously wrong. One night the phone at the nearly empty bar rang around 2am. Answering it, Kristen heard a frantic Liam on the other end. The neighborhood was in chaos. People fighting in the streets, screams and gunshots. The infection had reached their little neighborhood.

Kevin, Kristen's manager gave her the baseball bat he kept under the bar, opened the cash register thrusting a large wad of twenty dollar bills in her hand, and made her leave immediately. Sean had already gotten Val and Liam packed up when she arrived home. Grabbing aimlessly at her own clothing, Kristen quickly threw her belongings into a large duffel bag. They loaded up into the old Roadmaster and left.

Sean and Liam had received a call from their father. The man was indeed still kind enough and was worried about his distant children. Now working as a kitchen supervisor at a naval base in Florida, he seemed to think that the south coast was the safest place to wait the infection out. He urged them to make the trip if they thought it was safe. Seeing little other choice, they waited in a long line for gas.

Kristen muttered a small pray of thanks for the generosity of her employer. Without him emptying the cash register into her pocket, they would have been sorely unprepared for this impending disaster. The furnace had conked out the week before and it had been a bundle to replace the parts. Kristen was not met with any relief when she realized that she no longer needed to worry about the state of their furnace.

They drove for days and days. The roads were still busy with travelers at this point. The gas stations and minimarts still open, albeit with highly inflated prices. The farther south they got though, the more desperation and horrors they witnessed.

The first time they saw one of the infected, none of them could believe their eyes. It seemed too cliché. Like 'Night of the Living Dead.' Kristen thought the infected would at least look a bit more original. When it got closer though, any curiosity she may have felt was replaced with pure carnal terror. Sean was poised with the bat raised, ready to take a swing if it got any closer to their car. A fellow traveler stepped out though and smashed it's head in with a hammer. "You have to go for the brains."

He said it so matter of fact. He had just killed a sick person. Kristen couldn't control herself from running over to the body. All of her protective and maternal instincts kicked in. But as she knelt near the infected body, a sense of pervasive sickness took over her. This wasn't human. The body was decaying from the inside out, a horrific grimace overtaking its face - even in it's second death. Go for the brains. They would remember that.

By the time they reached Georgia the roads were clearing out of people. They thought it would only be a day or two before they reached Florida.

Then they came to the outskirts of Atlanta. Smoke was still rising from the bombed out city. Hundreds of cars parked on the roads in a standstill. Everyone seemed frozen in place. Unable to continue down the road and obviously not able to drive through Atlanta, they parked the car alongside the others and tried to rest for a spell.

Now here they were, the only one resting was Val. But for now, that was enough.

The next day they decided to stick around and try and see what necessities they could salvage from the abandoned cars.

Kristen thought that the presence of other healthy people would be good for Val. Show her that there was still some normalcy in the world. Val had even found a playmate. Only a few short hours after taking stock of their remaining supplies, Val appeared with a slim blonde girl at her side.

"Krissy, this is Sophia. Is it okay if we go play by her truck?"

Kristen had smiled warmly at the girl but her eyes were still wary.

"Hello Sophia. Does your family know that you wandered off? I'm sure they'll be very worried about you."

The blonde girl's face turned bright red. Suddenly she seemed very fearful, as though the possibility of her getting into trouble meant something much more serious. Kristen recognized the signs that she herself had exhibited as a child. Anxieties she desperately kept Val from experiencing.

"Oh honey, it's okay. I'm sure your mom will be so happy that you found a friend." She reached out and placed a hopefully reassuring arm on the small girl.

"Sophia? Sweetie? Where are you?" A frantic voice could be heard from a few parked cars over. Sophia seemed relieved to hear that it was her mother's voice and not someone else's.

"I'm over here mama! I'm with my new friend Val-en-tine-ah." Kristen couldn't help but smile at the young girl's enunciation.

Sophia's mother made her way over to the small group. Her face was the same shade of red that Sophia's had turned and her brow was deeply furrowed. She ran a hand through her shortly cropped silvering hair. "Sophia, I told you not to leave the truck without me or your father. I was so worried that something had happened to you."

"I'm sorry Mama. We were just asking if Val could come and play."

"Yes, I'm sure it's okay. At least until your father gets back from looking for more gasoline." For the first time, the shorthaired woman noticed Kristen. "I'm so sorry, I hope she wasn't bothering you."

"Not at all! Valley was getting pretty sick of just being stuck with me." Kristen wrinkled her nose playfully at her little sister.

"She seems like a very sweet child. I'm sorry for being so worrisome. You know what it's like being a mother though. Always something to worry about."

For a moment, Kristen wasn't sure how to correct the woman. She wasn't a mother to any of 'her kids' but she understood what the woman meant more than words could express. Especially now with the way things were, her mind never stopped worrying. If she wasn't worried about their safety, she was worried about them worrying at how much she was obviously worrying.

Luckily, Val saved her from having to decide on what to say. "Krissy isn't my mom. She's just my big sister."

The woman smiled easily but a sad look flashed through her eyes. She probably assumed that their mother was lost to the infection. Kristen didn't see any reason to correct that notion if it was what people were going to assume. Their dirty laundry could stay home in Boston.

"I'm Carol. It's very nice to meet you Krissy."

"Nice to meet you Carol. I prefer Kristen though if it's okay. Krissy makes me sound a bit too much like a ditz."

Val cut in, "But I like calling your Krissy! Missy Kissy Krissy."

"And I like calling you Tiny Teeny Tina but it doesn't mean that you should introduce yourself to strangers that way!" Kristen couldn't help laughing at her little sister. She had already seemed brighter since finding a friend.

"It looks like you're busy with supplies. I don't mind watching the girls for a bit if you want to focus on the task at hand. Our truck is right over there." Kristen wasn't sure what it was but there was something about Carol that struck her as trustworthy. The love that the woman had for her daughter was so genuine and moving that Kristen was certain that Val would be safe with them for a while. Plus, she did have a lot of 'salvaging' she wanted to do and she wasn't sure she wanted her eight year old sister tagging along for that.

Kristen left the girls with Carol and began to wander among the abandoned cars. Liam and Sean had already headed out hours ago, taking the bat, the gun, and a few empty oil cans with them. The plan was to walk and try to find a gas station, abandoned or otherwise. Either that, or they'd be reduced to siphoning gas from parked cars. Kristen smiled wryly at the thought; it certainly wouldn't be the first time the McCoy boys would be guilty of that.

Kristen had been prepared for facing a mess among the abandoned cars, but what she wasn't prepared for were the bodies. Rotting bodies, the majority with gunshot wounds or heavy abrasions to the temple littered many of the cars. Despite whatever riches those cars may hold, she couldn't bring herself to pry open the doors.

After filling her reusable shopping bag with a few found dented cans of chili and a few boxes of stale Saltines, she headed back towards their makeshift camp. She was excited about the chili. It was even better than the generic brand they ate at home. She'd set the hot plate up and make them a little feast. Maybe they could even invite Carol and Sophia for a dinner date…

"Get that thing the fuck out of my face, you redneck asshole!" Kristen's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by an all too familiar voice. It was Sean's 'fighting voice.' She had heard it far too many times in the alleyway after dark, Sean stumbling home after a few too many beers at a party. She heard it when neighborhood assholes picked on Liam. She heard it when patrons at the bar got too grabby with her and word traveled back to him. And now she was hearing it as her brother was face to face with a very dangerous looking weapon. The bat in her brother's hand seemed pretty irrelevant compared to the bow and arrow contraption that was pointed between his eyes. Of course Sean would give the more powerful weapon to his younger brother.

"Wha' the fuck do you think ya doin' with that gas from mah truck?" The man's accent was heavy, his words slightly slurred. A mixture of his southern drawl and possibly some Southern Comfort.

Sean smirked sarcastically. "Well you weren't using it obviously. I'm surprised that heap of shit truck can even run." Leave it to her baby brother to provoke someone when they had an arrow to his head.

The man's muscles tensed, his jaw clenched and his fingers twitched against the trigger of the bow. It was probably less of a blessing and more of a curse that the McCoys had grown unnaturally at ease in volatile situations. Kristen wasn't willing to take the chance that this man was actually going to shoot her brother though.

"Sean, what the hell? I thought you were only siphoning abandoned cars." She strode forward purposefully and physically inserted herself between her brother and the bow. A few inches taller than she, she looked up at the man straight in the eyes, no fear visible in her's. She knew deep down that this man wouldn't shoot her. His 'Southern manners' would most likely never allow him to shoot an unarmed lady.

Instead, he sneered at her. "Wha? You don't think your man here can handle hi'sself?"

She lifted her chin a fraction of a centimeter, crossed her arms the same way she did when she was telling Liam off for getting into fights. "That's not it at all. My brother is perfectly capable of winning a fight. This one just doesn't seem that fairly matched. And my brother is enough of a loose cannon to actually provoke you into shooting him. If you want to lower your weapon, I'll be happy enough to step aside so you two can work things out like gentlemen."

The man appeared dumbfounded but surely, he slowly lowered the bow. Taking advantage of his bewildered state, in one quick motion Kristen raised her fist and sent it flying into his face. The man recoiled instantly, blood steadily but lightly falling from his nose. His expression changed rapidly, shock to anger to curiosity to something she couldn't quite recognize.

"Nobody raises a weapon against my family, you asshole." Kristen spoke calmly. She took Sean by the arm, picked up the gas can, and walked away.