CHAPTER TWO

Rhiannon was sitting in a bright, sunlight kitchen; Hadley curled up on a rug by the door, watching Maggie and Rhiannon as they washed the dishes. It was 7am. The thought made Rhiannon giddy. The watch she had been wearing had stopped working ages ago, and she was surprised by how much she had missed knowing the time, and what the date was. She felt more like a human again.

She had woken up that morning in a bed, with clean sheets, in a house that wasn't ransacked or broken down. She had taken a warm shower the night before and shaved her legs and spent the whole night rubbing them together under the sheets, savoring the smooth feeling. When she woke up she had tried to find Daryl and the deer from the day before so she could help to skin and preserve it, but she had been intercepted by Maggie, the kind, smiling girl who had brought her to this house and given her new, clean clothes after feeding her a hot meal. So instead of skinning a deer, she was here, in Maggie's kitchen, washing dishes and laughing. It all felt surreal, like she was going to wake up any minute now and be hanging in a tree, or hiding under a car.

Hadley had gladly adjusted to this place. It had only been one night and she was already back to the dog she was before dead people started walking and eating their loved ones. She had adapted quickly to be Rhiannon's protector and fellow-hunter, but this is where she belonged, laying on a rug in a beam of sunlight, a belly full of bacon and a full day to do nothing.

While she scrubbed at a plate then handed it to Maggie to rinse and dry, she listened to the girl talking about the different jobs they needed filled, trying to find a good fit for Rhiannon. Glancing out the window, she saw Daryl walking, his arms red with blood up to the elbow.

"Does he always look like that?" she asked. It was a comfort when she realized last night, while they were eating dinner, that Daryl was quiet with everyone, and not just her.

Maggie laughed, "oh yeah. Dirty Daryl," she smiled as she placed the plate in the cupboard with the others. "He's pretty scruffy. Has been since I met him, but he's good." She went quiet for a moment, her gaze focused on Daryl out the window. "We wouldn't be here without him." She sounded sad and Rhiannon decided not to press it and changed the subject.

"So what were you saying about guard duty? I could be good at that. I'm a good hunter, too. Oh and I can handle myself around the Dead, so-"

"You call 'em that? Dead? You call 'em the Dead?" Maggie was looking at her funny.

"Er, well, yeah. They're dead, aren't they?"

Maggie nodded, "we call 'em walkers. We call our dead the dead. We honor the dead. We don't honor the walkers."

"Oh," Rhiannon didn't know how to reply. They must have lost a lot of people. They must have a lot of dead. Rhiannon's family was all gone, except her sister, and she wasn't even sure where she was or if she was still alive.

"Well," Maggie said, interrupting her thoughts and breaking the pall that had fallen over their previously light-hearted conversation. "I still gotta think on where to put you, but Rick said to send you to talk to him. I think he's still at his house."

After getting directions to the correct house from Maggie, Rhiannon and Hadley set off to find him. On the way she passed several people, some with weapons, and stern looks, most with no weapons that smiled at her. Last night, after dinner, Rick had asked her to give up her weapons and she had spent about five minutes pulling all the knives out of their various places on her body. She had about ten on her belt, two in each boot, one around her right thigh, a couple under her shirt, sheathed and tucked into her bra, and two larger ones criss-crossed on her back. She felt naked without them, vulnerable, even though Rick had promised she would be safe in Alexandria, and that she would get them back soon. When she reached the house Maggie had described, she was walking up the steps when a teenage boy came barreling out the door. He stopped when he saw her, and tipped his big hat towards her. "I'm Carl," he said. "You must be Rhiannon?"

"Yeah, that's me. This is Hadley," he reached down to pet her on the head.

"I haven't seen a dog in so long," he explained. "How did you keep her safe this whole time? Daryl said you were by yourself, you kept her with you?"

"Uh yeah," Rhiannon replied. "She's been with me since before…."

Carl spent a few minutes petting Hadley and kissing her before he said he had to go, something about someone named Enid.

Inside, Rhiannon found Rick, Daryl, and Michonne sitting in the living room. Michonne was just as intimidating as she had been at dinner, not saying much, sitting to the left of Rick, but Rhiannon could tell she was evaluating every thing about her. Daryl's hands were clean of blood but he was still streaked with dirt and sweat, sitting on the other side of Rick, who gestured for her to have a seat across from them. She did and Hadley sat next to her, resting her head in Rhiannon's lap and Rhiannon placed a hand on top of her head.

"That dog really likes you, huh?" Rick smiled.

Rhiannon smiled back, "we're buds," she said. "It's been the two of us for so long…. We're all we have, ya know? She kept me safe, I kept her safe. Together we made it out of quite a few tight spots."

"About that," Rick said, "We need to know we can trust you. Daryl said you killed four men, 'cause you had to. I need to know why you had to."

Swallowing, Rhiannon pet Hadley and thought to herself. She had figured something like this would come up. It was the smart thing to ask, and she appreciated that these people were smart. If she didn't tell them, they couldn't trust her, and if they couldn't trust her, they wouldn't let her stay, and she desperately wanted to stay here. So she took a deep breath and told them her whole story.

She started at the beginning, when her dad got sick. He had a fever that turned worse and he died before they could get him to the hospital. Her mother had been crying by his bedside all night and Rhiannon was sitting in the corner of the room when she watched her dead father sit up in bed and bite her mother's neck. The tears were still wet on her cheeks as her blood soaked the bed and Rhiannon ran out of the room, down the stairs and out the front door of her house. Hadley was with her then, and she was with her when she ran to her ex boyfriends house. He had left her for another girl, but he was the only friend she had so she ran to him. They had stuck together, Rhiannon, her ex, and his family in the beginning, but it only took a few months until everyone but Rhiannon and her ex was dead. One night, while scavenging for supplies, she and Hadley had gotten trapped in a small storage room while the Dead swarmed them. She looked up and made eye contact with her ex as he ran out the door. Luckily she had a knife and the Dead were bottlenecking through the door slowly enough that she could take them out. That was when Hadley had taken on the role of protector, biting the Dead Ones in the knees so they would fall and go slower. A week later she found him, hiding in an apartment, with a large chunk of his calf missing, teeth marks rotting the flesh. He begged her to cut off his leg but it had been two days already and the fever had set in, so he begged her to kill him. He didn't want to wait until he became one of them, so when Rhiannon refused, he took a knife and slit his own throat. She told Rick about how he did it wrong, so he was suffering, bleeding slowly, in agony, so she did it quick, fast, a bullet to the brain. The last bullet she ever fired. She was crying softly remembering it. She could still see his face, feel his soft hair and recall his face as he died. He was the first person who's life she had taken herself.

"And the other three?" Rick asked, and Rhiannon looked up at him. She had forgotten Daryl and Michonne were there. Michonne looked sad, her eyes full of empathy, and Daryl was still impossible to read, so Rhiannon took a deep breath and continued.

She was alone for a while after that, eventually meeting up with a family who had been on the road. They took her in, she hunted for them, and they gave her company. Until one night, they were camping when three men ambushed them. They tied them up in ropes and gagged them, ransacking their belongings. Rhiannon had already started collecting knives by that point and had one hidden on her which she was using to cut through the ropes while they were distracted. But soon they had taken everything they wanted and turned their attention back to Rhiannon and the people she was with. There was an older father, a mother, and a young boy, about eight years old. The leader of the group shot the boy in between the eyes first, then the mother who was screaming and choking on her gag, and laughed at the father before pulling the trigger on him too. He didn't shoot Rhiannon though; he pushed her on her back and started to undress her while the others reached to hold her down. Hadley had clamped her jaws down on one of their legs and while he turned to kick her, Rhiannon finally got her hands loose. She reached up and stabbed the man who was looming over her right in the neck. Blood spilled all over her and she could hardly see but she swung her knife around until it made contact with the man on her left. He screamed and she yanked her arm back, pulling the knife out and wiping the blood out of her eyes. She saw that she had stabbed him in the shoulder and the third man was lunging towards her. Sitting up she turned and sank the knife into his eye, and then she pulled it out and cut his throat with it. He sank to the ground, gurgling, and the one she had stabbed was cursing and trying to reach for the gun in his waistband. Rhiannon threw her knife at him and it sank, blade first, into his forehead. She had wanted to stay, to mourn the kind strangers who had taken her in, to bury them properly, but all the screaming and the gunshots had attracted the Dead. She could hear them shuffling through the woods towards her and Hadley, who was limping from being kicked so hard. That was the first night Rhiannon had carried her up a tree on her back, and held her through the night while she slept, too afraid to sleep herself, and too angry and tired to rest even though she desperately wanted to.

"It's just been me and Hadley since that night, which, I think, was about a year ago" Rhiannon finished, her voice shaking. "I try not to think about it," she shrugged, looking up at the three strangers who she'd just told about the worst night of her entire life. They were looking at her with pity in their eyes, but something else too. Michonne looked strangely proud of her, Rick looked thoughtful, and Daryl just looked angry like always.

"I'm sorry to make you relive that," Rick said, "but I appreciate you being honest with us. So your whole family is gone?"

"Uh, no," she replied. "I have a younger sister, I've been trying to get North to see if I can find her, she was visiting our grand parents in New Jersey, but I couldn't contact her and I have no idea what happened to her. Her name's Emma, actually, and Hadley was her dog. She brought her home from the shelter one day about a year before the world fell to pieces."

"Well," Rick said, "you can stay with us as long as you like. We do ask that you help out."
"Of course!" Rhiannon replied, standing up. "I told you I ain't no mooch. I can do whatever you need me to, I swear."
"Alright, alright," he said, standing up as well. "For now, you can go on a run with Daryl."