Title: Walking Shadows

Chapter 1

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: When the world as he knows it ends, Daryl Dixon relies on a most unlikely ally to survive.

Timeline: This is the first of seven chapters that pick up immediately after the ending of the mid-season finale.

Author's note: I have striven to be as faithful to character (and the show) as possible. That being said, you may be offended, repulsed, or upset by some parts of what follows. This story is firmly rated M and contains graphic descriptions of violence, bad language, and sexual content.


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Life's but a walking shadow …


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He couldn't have imagined how quickly it all went to hell – as if it hadn't all been hell before.

All he can see is Sophia's body, speckled grey and mottled maroon like mackerel skin, like the bloated fish that drown in the reservoir mud in last year's drought, the air reeling in fishstink and death.

In front of him Carol rises, leaving the restraint of his arms, but she doesn't go towards her daughter, or rather, that limp thing that once was her daughter. Instead she turns and quietly walks away as they all now look to one another. Blame rises rife in their eyes.

In the midst of Shane's shouting and Rick's quiet horror, which was all the more terrifying, no one sees her walk back to the tents, sit down, and press Sophia's soiled doll to her chest. No one sees her, not even him, but that single gunshot will stay with him for the rest of his life.

He goes, he runs, but he knows it's not quick enough, it can't be, and when he sees the dark red stains slipping down the sides of the blue tent, he stops. Lori and Carl have followed him, and they reel backwards. Lori crumples to the ground, clutching out for her son, and then she looks to him. He sees himself – Daryl Dixon – reflected in the horror of her eyes. He's not sure if there are tears in his own, but he knows one thing.

He can't take this, he can't take this anymore.

"Fuck all y'all."

He yanks the crossbow from the table and stomps towards Merle's bike.

Shane rushes towards him, and Andrea follows him like a sticky shadow. It's no secret she's banging Shane. They make a great couple, he thinks, attractive but mentally unstable fucktards, the pair of them.

"No one leaves," Shane says as he comes to stand in front of Daryl, blocking his path. He levels the shotgun at his chest. In the distance Daryl sees Rick standing over Hershel, trying to drag him to his feet. Glenn is holding onto Maggie, and it looks like he might fall down if she wasn't there.

"This how it's going to be?" Daryl asks.

"Yep," Shane says, nodding his head. "This is exactly how it's going to be."

Shane taps his chest with the shotgun. He isn't looking at Rick, and Daryl knows exactly why that is. Rick wouldn't let this shit fly, but then again, Rick's in no place to make that choice, and right now he'd have no say in letting Shane shoot him here.

He's on his own, and Daryl thinks that's how it's always been. He's stupid to think it could ever be any different.

"Yeah," Shane repeats, looking more and more pleased with himself, as if he likes the way that word tastes in his mouth. "That's how it's going to be now."

"No," Daryl says. "No, no it ain't."

He rushes towards him before the crossbow even hits the ground, thumping him solidly in the chest with his shoulder. The air gurgles out of Shane's lungs in a disgusting belch as he goes down hard. Shane once put him in a lock before, but this time it's different. Shane gasps at a sharp punch and pummel, and then his face contorts and he slumps to the dusty red ground. It wasn't a fair fight, but Merle never taught him to fight fair.

"Don't think I won't shoot you too," Andrea says as he picks up the bow. It's solid in his hand, but her voice is dead calm as he turns to face her. Her fingers are twitchy on the trigger, and Daryl realizes now just how much he hates having a gun held on him. It really pisses him off.

"I already wasted one arrow on you," he spits at her. "Don't make me waste another."

Her only response is to tighten her grip on the gun. She's sweating already, and he thinks sourly, yep, this is how it's going to be, because this is how it always is.

He pulls the keys to the bike from his pocket and dangles them from his hand. The crossbow rests against his chest as he moves to throw them to her.

Automatically Andrea shifts the gun from her right hand to her left, holding open her fingers to catch them. He doesn't even hesitate when he lets the bolt fly. It looses from the crossbow in a whoosh and smashes straight through the fleshy center of her waiting palm.

It hangs there, suspended. Andrea stares at the missile protruding from her hand in disbelief dark-washed with horror. Blood wells and drips. It splashes on her canvas sneaker so loud he can hear the sodden plop of it.

Her too-blue eyes meet his, glazed with shock and surprise no less than a terrible anger. She won't ever forgive him for this, just the way he won't ever forgive her for shooting him. At least now they're even and she won't be using that hand to wave a gun in his face. Bitch. He never liked her.

"That," he tells her, as she drops the gun, "wasn't a waste."

He's halfway to the bike when she starts screaming. He smiles for the first time in forever.


/-/-/-/-/


Merle smiled when he pulled the wings of flies. It was wanton and it was fascinating, the way Merle could destroy things, the off-handed way he did it. Sometimes Daryl felt his whole life he was trying to counter that, to put things back together, though he never could. He's never been impressed with his powers to keep things together, but sometimes only at his ways of keeping them from falling apart.

It was a useful skill he'd developed looking after Merle all the time, Merle who couldn't be bothered to hold a normal job or pay bills or sometimes even take care of himself.

That wasn't the way it had been, in the beginning.

In the beginning, it was always Merle looking out for him. It had been Merle who had fed him, clothed him, and raised him when their father couldn't be bothered, and it was Merle who defended him those black-and-blue times when Buck Dixon could.

It had been Merle who stood over Daryl as he grew up, when he had been small and runtish, and it was Merle who smacked up big fat Freddy Rankin in the fourth grade when he called Daryl a pussy. It was Merle who later showed him how to hit back in all the ways that hurt. It was Merle who showed him how to lift a six-pack from Boudreax's corner store, and Merle who laughed when he vomited an hour later. It was Merle who told him how to get his hands up Marcy Madison's panties in eighth grade, and Merle who told him it wouldn't be worth it (it wasn't). It had been Merle who taught him how to gut animals and pull their steaming bowels out to find the meat when he was hungry, and Merle who showed him how to hide in the back swamp, how to blend in between black mud and the blistering greenness of skunk cabbage leaves.

It had been Merle who saved him, when he was ten and their father had come in drunk from shooting at the stars. It had been Merle who pushed back when his father hit them this time, when his nose burst in a bright gush of arterial red.

It was Merle who blasted six rounds of buckshot into his skull.

He'd thought then that it would get better, but Merle was always on some kind of lark now. He ditched classes to work on bikes and race revamped cars down the deserted drag near the old cotton mill, and when he got bored being in the front seat, Merle found out just what he could get in the back seat. He spent months in juvie for leading fourteen officers from two parishes on a car chase one Sunday, just because he was bored, a chase that made local news because he'd smashed up two dozen vehicles, managed to jackknife a tractor trailer, and put three bystanders in the hospital. He spent another half year for vandalism, for spray-painting crude depictions of Sheila Hansen's tits on every store window on the main street when she wouldn't give him a blowjob. Later he did time for petty theft at Lachafalaya for trying to steal a tv from Tyson's showroom, and just barely got off on assault for breaking Officer Thiboult's nose when he tried to stop him.

The prosecutor had offered to drop charges if Merle packed himself off to the army, if he got what they called a "sense of purpose." The recruiter hadn't been nearly as enthusiastic but Merle liked the way the Gulf War was painted on tv (one he didn't steal) and agreed. It didn't last long, not even through basic training. Discipline and respect were foreign concepts to Merle.

So he'd come home. And suddenly the little brother he'd hardly noticed in the last few years had filled out and grown up. Merle had seen this with a gleam in his eye.

In the middle of Daryl's eleventh grade, Merle disappeared for a week. He never called but he came back sunburned with a stash of hard drugs and, more useful, a network of willing contacts. Money had been short for years, and dealing was an easy way around it. It was a short cut, and Merle liked short cuts.

When Daryl came home after school now, he'd find Merle blacked out in the dark rooms of the trailer, tangled in a spiderweb of drunk women with bleached hair and blurry tattoos. Sometimes he'd find him drinking Thunderbird under the sap and shade of the old pine tree in the front yard, aiming the rifle at crows or old Dean Docker driving by in the the mail truck (Dean was deaf and never heard the gunshots). Daryl quit his afterschool job, because he never quite knew what Merle would do when he woke up. He'd already sliced the ear off one of the girls, though she'd been too high to realize it at the time. It had been Daryl who drove her to the hospital and put her on the back doorstep where the nurses came to smoke, where he knew she'd be found. Now he was the one picking up and providing alibis.

They'd grown as much together as apart over these last years, living in trailer where their father had died, that had grown progressively shabbier with time. He wanted none of Merle's business – he was clear about that – but he was there to take over all those jobs that Merle couldn't be bothered to hold down, construction, mechanic, road crew, line cook – the last for only eight days, and the surfeit-sweet smell of lemon chess pie still makes him sick. Watching as Merle zoomed around on his precious bike – and god, he loved that stupid bike, the way it growled and brought every tramp in earshot – waiting for nothing he was sure of, and everything he wasn't.

But it had been Merle who had seen the dead ones first, Merle who reacted in terror as much as sense, who had been practical and gathered up every gun he could find, loading them in the truck with his damn bike. It was Merle who found him, Merle who saved him (again), Merle who – in the end – had been chained to an Atlanta rooftop and left behind to die.


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He doesn't get very far.

Merle's bike sucks gas like a whore, and by late afternoon the gas gage is ticking low. He'd prefer to stay away from towns, but he needs fuel and some water wouldn't hurt either. He's been riding for the better part of two days, avoiding wrecks, but now Daryl turns towards a sign that says Franklinburg and cruises down the long hill towards it. Houses with gables and porches cluster on both sides of the street and it looks every bit like a gingerbread village, except for the absence of people. A few cars are jacked unevenly over the pavement, and a bedraggled crow rasps from the roof of one before flying into the branches of a nearby elm. Two basketballs and a red dodgeball roll lazily across the street. The main drag is otherwise deserted but he sees a gas station ahead, the green and yellow Shell petals blooming over the street.

He sits on the bike and surveys the desolation.

This is what the world has come to – nothing. There's a part of him that's sad, but there's a part of him that doesn't really notice the difference. Don't fuck with nature, he thinks, wiping sweat from his forehead, because she will surely fuck with you.

He hears the snarl too late, and turns. A walker is coming up behind him, half its face gnawed away and the rest of it hanging in lank strips. He can see its grey jaw, black teeth, and rotting tongue mottled with greenflies. A second comes out too, and a third, blocking the road behind him. He only has two arrows left, and a clip with five bullets, so he revs the bike and guns it down the main strip. The air vibrates with the rev and cough of Merle's cycle, thick with sudden smoke.

He's looking behind him, and maybe that's how it happens, since he doesn't know where she – it? – comes from, but suddenly another walker snarls to his left and throws herself towards him. Her distended belly – a pregnant walker, fuck – bounces towards him and he swerves without thinking, as if she is a real person, but he's going too fast and the bike skitters under his hands. It jerks sideways and they go down, skidding across the pavement. He lands hard on his shoulder and feels something tear, at least splinter, a hot white searing. His head slams the pavement as they go, and a hail of sparks explodes upward as he slides forward in a tangle of metal wreckage. He feels the hot abrasion of the macadam grinding away the fabric on his leg and screams as it bites into his flesh. Somehow he pulls away and comes to a scudding stop, but the bike careers forwards, crashing into the gas pumps he was aiming for. The explosion is unexpected, a mad ball of inferno that gushes upwards as the tanks of the station blow. He flattens on the pavement and feels the gust of hot air crush him like a windshield wiper. Ratbastardfuck, of course, the only station with fuel would go up in rushing flames.

He can hear the shuffle of walkers behind him, but he's lost his bow and gun somewhere along the way. He rolls, curses as it hurts, and sees a band of ragged ugly creatures staggering towards him. There are so many now, too many, pressed shoulder to shoulder as they come forward, like a grisly wave of rotten garbage.

But the world is flickering, and as it finally goes black, he isn't wondering if this is how it will end, if this is how he will die.

What he's really thinking is, shitballs, Merle's going to be so pissed about his bike.


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