Chapter 2- The Group
Silence fell among the Jeep after the sun started to set. Usually, around this time, I'd be hunkering down for the night and risking a few hours of shut eye. Even though my trust wasn't fully with these guys, I at least trusted Merle to wake someone up before he dozed off. That and since we were basically in the middle of a huge field, I trusted that no Walkers would come out of the bushes and eat us in our sleep.
My eyelids were in the process of drooping down when Merle nudged me with his shoulder.
"Hey, Ayden," He whispered, glancing in the back seat to a hunched over, sleeping Daryl. His hooked seatbelt kept him from falling into the back of my seat.
"Yeah?" I said drowsily without opening my eyes. When he didn't reply back, I forced my eyes to reopen and focus on his concentrated face. "You're not falling asleep on me, are ya?"
"No," He bluntly said, gripping the steering wheel tighter until his knuckles turned a pale white.
I furrowed my eyebrows at him until the action caused me to grow even drowsier. I thought of what to say next, but when he still didn't tell me why he called my name in the first place, my eyes drooped once again.
"Shit!" Merle yelled angrily, making me jolt out of sleep and sit up straight. I rubbed my eyes and shut them almost immediately after I opened them; the sun was beating down on the jeep so brutally it reminded me of that one time I tagged along on a business trip with one of the Melrose Apartment's mothers. The only thing I didn't know is that he was a climatologist and we had to spend the whole weekend in Death Valley, California. I honestly didn't think they were being literal when they named it Death.
Merle screeched the jeep to a halt, sliding six inches away from a barricade of cars similar to what I protected myself with in the Home Depot parking lot. I carefully peeked over my hand, searching for my Aviators in my pack with my other hand. Once I found them, I slammed them on and looked at the city in front of me.
"Can you fucking explain to me why we're in Atlanta right now?" I yelled, pulling myself up with the top of the windshield. I motioned to Atlanta's skyscrapers that sat motionlessly, like everything else in eyesight, right in front of us.
A disgruntled huff of air came from the backseat, following an equally angry grunt. "Big city," Daryl questioned, unhooking his seatbelt and sitting on the edge of his seat like I was, "you wanna get us killed, Merle?"
"Maybe if the dumbass with the map didn't sleep for fourteen hours I woulda known where I was goin'!" Merle yelled back, slamming his door open and grabbing a rifle before he climbed out. We both followed his lead and grabbed our stuff.
"Fourteen hours?" I yelled at him as he swerved through the parked cars without us, "then how did you sleep?"
"Pulled over!" He yelled back, his echo bouncing off the modern plate glass buildings.
"Stop yelling!" I hypocritically yelled back, my hands clenching the straps of my pack. "If your stink don't attract the Walkers your loud-ass voice will!"
I watched as his arm rose up in my direction, and even though I couldn't tell if he raised a specific finger up, I could very well guess he did.
And now it's time for some Ayden-Daryl bonding. Yay.
"Guess we're hoofin' it," Daryl muttered, shrugging as my mouth fell open.
"Is your brother bat-shit crazy?" I asked, honestly enough that he laughed heartily. I glared at him until he started following Merle's path into the city.
"You get used to it," He replied. I groaned and reluctantly shuffled my feet behind Daryl. Okay, so maybe I was having second thoughts about following these two idiots around. But what's better than keeping someone around after being absolutely alone for almost a year? Blegh.
As we weaved through the assorted heap of cars in silence, other than the occasional crunch of glass and the wind blowing in between the buildings making my stomach feel more than queasy, I let my mind wander off into a place possibly far more enchanting than Georgia. More specifically New York, which if not for the apocalypse I'd probably be sitting on a sidewalk next to some dude with a ghetto blaster, hating life. But I liked this lifestyle, and the fact that I lived through my teens being half Italian half Indian in the not-so-great part of Queens, it was sorta like how I lived now, minus the dead people walking around.
"Hey, Daryl," I said, breaking the silence. My sudden voice made the nearby bush filled with tiny birds scatter away. They were those tiny, baby like birds; living proof that even in a world where the living risen from dead you could still find beauty.
"Yo," He replied, glancing at me for a split second before returning his sight to the pavement. He stepped over an overturned, open suitcase, looking at it intently but not stopping to see if there was anything salvageable in it. I uninterestedly stepped around it after he did.
"What would you be doing now?" I asked, reviewing the question in my head and realizing it wouldn't make sense to someone who couldn't read my thoughts, so I added, "If the world didn't go to shit?"
"Uh," he huffed and paused for a moment to think. As he did, he reached into a red minivan's open window and pulled out a pair of pliers. He shrugged one shoulder and slid it into his back pocket. "I dunno, what's today?"
"Lemme check," I said, reaching into my right back pocket for my IPod. Even though my pocket couldn't have been more than five inches deep, I still fished around in it like it was Mary Poppins bag that held the world's secrets inside.
Hey, no biggie, it wasn't in there. Sometimes, I forget and put it into the cup holder of my pack. So, I swung the side that held the fishnet strip of fabric down to my chest and looked in there.
Shit. No purple cased IPod in there, either.
"Do you know where I put my IPod?" I asked, my voice shaking unnoticeably. I swallowed hard when he looked back at me and shook his head.
"Ah, wait," Daryl said suddenly, "you was charging it with that new cord you got, remember?"
I laughed and let my pack go, shifting my weight so the force of it swinging back wouldn't knock me over. To attempt to remain calm, I enveloped my fingers around my face.
Believe it or not, that IPod really was my life. Or at least, before all this happened and about three days into the apocalypse. It renewed my hope and faith for this world, and the fact that Merle found me a charger for it (car charger, at that!) made him my new best friend. I couldn't lose all of now.
"I'll be back!" I yelled, immediately turning around and running back toward the Jeep without a reply. I felt his wanting to follow me or to tell me to stop, but his needing gaze didn't stop me for running for the thing that kept me alive and striving for something.
I always wanted to be part of a track team in high school. For the two months that I actually got away with going to school (apparently being a dumpster baby instantly grants you not a 'legal' citizen of the United States, leave be New York), all I did was make a single friend and passed a single class: English. Now that I think about it, I really wanted to be a Journalist when I grew up. Isn't it funny how the present makes you forget about the past, when everything from the moment you started taking interest in things ties up to be what you are?
Anyway, I could easily run the best track guy in the school, and even though I went to a ghetto school in the ghetto-ist part of Queens, this guy could run pretty damn fast. And that guy was the single friend I had made for those two months and the single friend I had ever made in my teenage years.
See, you don't need friends to survive. I got along just fine.
My thoughts instantly focused to the console of the Jeep as it neared my sight. I sped up my legs a few notches and didn't stop until I got to the passenger side door. I paused for a few minutes to regain the breath I lost during the freaking marathon that I just ran and eased the door open. Once I snatched both the cord and my dearest IPod, I quickly climbed out of the Jeep and slammed the door shut.
Better keep this in my pack, I reminded myself, unzipping the biggest pocket of the pack and snugly placed the pair in between a few cans of fruit and a half empty bottle of water. Before I zipped the pocket shut, I admiringly picked up my knife that I respectively named Louie after the owner of the pawn shop I got it from. The accompanying adjustable holster loosely hung on to the blade of it, and since this reminded me that I didn't have a competent weapon to my name, I strapped it to my left thigh where I usually kept it.
After coddling my knife, I zipped the pack back up and slung it over my shoulder. Just as I was about to turn away, a familiar sense of rounded cold metal hit the back of my head, just over the loose ponytail I kept up almost 24/7.
An undesirable passion swept over me, telling me to disarm the gun that was two milliseconds from killing me and to kill the guy that held it there. Instead, since I actually do have a heart, I decided to strike a friendly conversation.
"Hey, there," I said, not daring to turn around. "I'm not a Walker, so could you please kindly take your gun away from my head? On second thought, you can keep it there. The cool metal feels good against this-"
"Shut up," a hoarse voice, definitely a man's, snapped back at me. I opened my mouth to speak again, but with another nudge to my head, I thought better of it. "Are you with anyone else?"
I swallowed hard when he took the gun away from my head. "Yeah, two other guys."
"Alright," he said, innocently enough that I took it as an invitation to turn around. I cautiously did so.
Damn, was he pretty.
"Shane," he said, extending his hand, "Shane Walsh."