Dr. Hershel Greene stood in the patient's room, head cocked, eyes narrowed, and watched Sheriff Rick Grimes quietly fighting for his life in the hospital bed. He reached up and flipped the TV set to off, understanding that it was on in an attempt to keep the man company, but it was a bothersome thing. All morning talk shows and self-importance and mind-numbing political discourse; a horrorshow of the whole wide world. Sometimes he thought that television might be the devil's work, a conduit for evil. He didn't have TV at his home, didn't abide by it or allow it.
With a slight out-blowing of his breath, he considered the bucolic safety of his farm, how he had worked so hard to protect its vintage charms and robust lifestyle amidst the slow-death systemic infection of modern civilization.
It was early rounds, so the Sheriff's hospital room and the hallway just outside the door wasn't filled to overflowing yet. The overwhelming tsunami of emotion of the evening before. The angry partner wasn't here and that was a relief to the actual energy inside the room. The woman was also conspicuously absent, he had seen her shielding the young boy, the son, and he assumed or at least hoped she was home making things as normal for that child as she could, knowing that her family was in crisis. He hoped she had the tenacity and perseverance to walk hand in hand with her husband as he wound his way through the valley of shadows. The man was going to benefit from that kind of shared burden.
Unlike the suffering body and soul next door who appeared to be as alone as a man can be. It was a shame how circumstances changed a life, redirected it, held it up, pulled the rug out from underneath.
And there but for the grace of God…
He had just come from Daryl Dixon's room and knew he might be the only one who recognized that these men were the same inside, underneath, down in the depths, in the marrowed bone. Where it mattered.
Officer Friendly was what Merle had nicknamed him but Daryl didn't know that, seeing as how Merle wasn't around. Not anymore. Handcuffed to a roof, thunderclouds forming angrily above his head. Frightened enough of the rising, ensuing storm to hacksaw his own hand free of its arm. He stood on the roof and took in the scene and as though whispers of a ghost spoke to him, he knew this new guy's name as sure as eggs is eggs was Officer Friendly.
He could talk trash with the best of them when he was riled enough to it. He turned and took a long, slow, meandering look out across the industrial section of Atlanta, across to the skyline, and beyond to the hills of Georgia. Not that he could see all that from where he was standing, but it was a vista as much a part of him as his own internal topography. It was bred into the bone.
Life had turned itself inside out the same way a coon dog gone to ferocious will turn a ring-tail inside out.
For the first time in decades, decades dammit, he felt the flicker of fear lick up every single vertebrae in his spinal column until it tongued into the base of his brain and washed his body with a fine sickening sheen of sweat. He did not want to be alone. Not with these monsters after him, please JC, not that. Under the bed, in a closet, clearing the fence in the backyard on the run, nothing was going to save him this time. He needed these people.
He squinted across the grey and gloomy expanse and caught the guarded but honest blue-eyed gaze of Officer Friendly. He caught it sure 'nuff as though it had been thrown at him.
He nodded, sucking his lips between his teeth. He needed that man and that man needed him. It was only a matter of time before the new world had them hunkered down beside one another, thigh pressed against thigh, flexing to leap into the fray together but first the big Busse cutting mirrored lines into their palms and their hands grasping fast to one another, bleeding into one another's wounds. Blood brothers.
The little girl had been missing four days and three nights before the local PD finally asked for help. Community members from towns within a drivable distance had convened on the edges of the downtown park, across the street from City Hall and the police station. The County Sheriff's office stood in charge of the search and rescue operation. Daryl distrusted the police on principle rather than experience but he had been following the story and wanted to offer his own homegrown skillset if he'd be allowed to do so. He wasn't about to join a group of Sunday School teachers and walk shoulder to shoulder through open pastures, though, like they was being organized to do. That wasn't where they were going to find her, discarded the same as rubbish in some highway-fronted cow field. But he did want to know what the grand plan was in the master scheme of the thing. He sidled up to the makeshift command central and cocked an ear, eyes narrowed as he oriented the location and gridwork on the maps pinned up on boards behind the milling, uniformed men.
He could see the USGS topographical green and brown map with the bold black x indicating where the father's body had been found, back of his head blown clean off by his own dark hand. Daryl stepped closer, head lowered, peering up from beneath his brows. He watched the two Sheriff's deputies who had found the man, recognized them from the news, bend their heads together conferring over a map spread out on a collapsible plastic banquet table. He took a deep breath, held it and walked up to the other side of the table, opposite them. Both men glanced up. The angry-looking one sneered slightly and looked back down after a few ratty seconds; the blue-eyed cop offered him a close-lipped, kinder acknowledgement.
"I can track," he told him, nodding slightly, matter of fact and quiet-like.
"So can the dogs," said the angry one, finger and gaze on the map.
"Yep. They ain't found her, though," Daryl replied, reckoning he would just go grab a cup of coffee and the blue-plate special at the diner across the street and head home.
The blue-eyed cop leaned towards him with just his head and one shoulder, steadying himself with a hand spread wide on the table top. "You know these woods?"
Daryl nodded. "Yes, sir. Since'n I was a boy, younger 'n her."
The partner turned on his booted heel and stepped away, all pretense of studying another number-gridded map with another group of the team.
Daryl kept his attention focused fast on the man in front of him. "I'm figurin' she hit Bear Bite Creek, stumbled around there for a time and has gone to ground. That'll throw the dogs. For a lil' while, least. They'll catch the scent again but could be too late by the time they do."
The man nodded. Behind him, his partner who was listening, with his face turned away - he had an unnerving habit of flicking the safety of his holstered handgun on off on off - shook his head, a firm, disgusted motion and rolled his shoulders back hard enough to touch the bones of his blades together, and Daryl knew in that moment that no one believed the little girl was going to be found alive.
But he did, he believed it and threw himself verbally forward and had no idea where this perseverance was coming from. His voice was pitching up an octave. "Can't get in there and track 'cause you people got it all cordoned off and I get that, but the trail's gonna be," he shrugged, "harder t'read, if you will, every hour that passes by. She's just a kid. She can't have gone that far."
The angry cop had come back, lingering at the other man's shoulder. "What makes you think someone didn't take her away from there? What else you think you know?"
He could feel the short hairs on the back of his neck bristle. His summer haircut fresh as the day. "Ain't no one else involved in this but that little girl and her daddy. She's either hurt bad or she's scared bad, same thing really." He looked away from the narrowing glance of both men, his skin transparent under their scrutiny. "What'ver."
The blue-eyed cop turned to another table and grabbed a nametag and sharpie in one fluid movement, turning back and bending over to write. "What's your name? See that transport? Get on it and head out there."
"Rick," warned his partner, voice low and menacing. Rick brushed him off with a quick head motion.
"Daryl," he told him and Rick scrawled it on the sticky paper DARRELL, handed it to him, and indicated he slap it onto his chest.
Daryl nodded, a grateful acknowledgement, and headed towards the open-bed deuce and a half.
"Hold up," Rick called, and then fell into step beside him. "I'll go with."
In the back of the truck, both men hunkered down, spines touching the sides of the bed, balancing on the balls of their feet as the vehicle grumbled, heading out of town and up into the overgrown woods. Daryl recognized the green uniforms of the two Fish & Game wardens, the light blue of two city policemen, good ole' boys, and then the Sheriff's brown and creams beside him. None of them would meet his eye. Pussies. His own Carhartts had a ragged hole in the left knee and the hems were torn out in the back, his Red Wing contractors creased and aged but kept supple with neatsfoot oil. A flannel that could use with a washing.
From the fleeting corners of his vision, he could see how Rick kept a hand on the tooled black holster, pressing it into his thigh, quieting the lethal man-made Python. He missed the comforting, dangerous weight of his Scout, laid across the backs of his shoulders as though a sun-dried and brainpan-emptied horse skull.
In the middle of the finely-combed campground the monster had built, now framed in flapping yellow tape, Daryl stood stock still breathing through the scene. The body was gone, but the blood remained, blackening the earth, human poison. And inside the tent, another pool of blood, this a crimson-stain, smaller and smeared around the gaping tear in the rip stop nylon floor.
Rick was standing beside him, holding the tent flap open, ushering in the light. Daryl stepped back and looked at him hard, stunned and betrayed by the police, the news, this sorry excuse for a father.
"He shot her," he said simply. "Shot his own little girl."
Rick nodded. "Someone shot her. Yes, that's what we think."
"Not someone. Her daddy. Then he turned the gun on himself," he walked away, "over here, like you found him. But he didn't know she was a fighter, that one. She got up, saw her daddy, and she-" The ground was churned up with bootprints and he kept walking, ducking under the tape, moving into the woods. "Here," he shouted back to Rick, "trail's right here." He bent down and traced the paw prints of the bloodhounds and the shuffling prints made by a heart-breaking child-sized pair of Keds.
"Let's go," Rick had a quick hand on his shoulder that he shrugged off, leading the way down towards the creek.
Carol stood, tentative and unsure, shoulders broken beneath the weight of her life, face blanched with the embarrassment of the undeniable facts of her personal horrorshow. Beth was on her way to stop in on the patient, smiling too sincerely at the Sheriff's Deputy standing surly guard outside the hospital room door. She paused when she saw the older women lingering in front of it, clutching the ragged bouquet of wild flowers and the second-hand vase.
"Can I help you locate a patient's room, m'am?" she asked her.
The woman flinched and Beth furrowed her brows.
"That's okay," the woman answered, vague.
"Are you here to see Mr. Dixon?" Beth guessed, trying to find a balance in her tone between a professional demeanor and sheer curiosity. She was wearing scrubs, trauma team green, and clogs, the sunlit hair messily pulled up to the crown of her head.
The woman looked up sharply, her expression a badly honed serrated knife's edge. She nodded, almost apologetically.
"Why, he's right in here then. C'mon," Beth lingered two fingers on the other woman's bicep before she pulled away and followed her past the guard and into the room. She stopped short and turned to her. "He's not awake, and he's not breathing on his own. He looks rough."
The woman nodded but still gasped and covered her mouth with her knuckles when she saw the figure in the bed. "Oh, Daryl Dixon," she sobbed out his name and Beth quickly tugged a Kleenex from the box on the bedside table and handed it to her while taking the flowers and setting them down.
"Are these Cherokee Roses?" she asked, fingering the snow white velvet petals.
The woman nodded; her hand hanging useless in the air above Daryl's arm.
"That's alright. You can touch him. Talk to him. Lotsa folks believe that comatose patients can hear you," Beth told her, walking around the foot of the bed to the other side, stepping up close, possessively against the edge, and lightly gripping his forearm.
"Good morning, Daryl. You missed a good breakfast and with hospital food that's not something to take lightly. We had fresh peaches from Patricia and Otis's farm, they brung 'em in all washed and juicy. I'll go over to their place and fetch you a couple, set 'em aside for when you decide you're hungry enough to wake up. Sweet Georgia peaches, ya know." She looked up and caught the starved eyes of the other woman. She smiled but it felt sad and strange. "Like that, see? Just talk to him like that."
Carol shook her head the smallest movement no.
Beth felt the pads of her fingers brushing against the riotous blonde hairs on the man's forearm, the masculine ropy muscle, the warm flesh.
"How do you know him," she asked kindly, interested.
"I don't. Not really. He found something that was lost to me. Taken from me. It meant a lot." She wiped her nose with the Kleenex and balled it into her fist. "That was a few years back now."
Beth nodded. "You can't be in here alone. I'm sorry." She rolled her eyes slightly at the open door. "You want to sit a while with him, here in this chair and I'll stand over there?"
"No," the woman said, her voice a whisper and her body listing towards the rocks, "that's alright. Thank you."
Beth watched as she turned away, walking out the door. The regretful life a thin, thin skin over the fragile wreck of her bones.