Innumerable stars freckled the early morning sky, the far eastern horizon beginning to glimmer with the vague suggestion of the impending dawn. The majority of the sky was still black through the layers of wide fan leaves and skinny pine needles overhead, and the faint scent of burning tobacco slinked through the light mist that clung low to the trunks of the trees. Inky darkness enveloped the forest, a thick blanketing of decaying leaves acting as a sound-dampening carpet. The sly round ember of a lit cigarette blinked in the blackness, and through the eerie silence one could make out the unmistakable crackling of the tobacco alighting. The shadow of a man squatted beside the puddle of another, an overwhelming stench of rot and ooze emanating from the spot. The living man had the cigarette curled into his hand, loosely clutched between his forefinger and thumb. He stared with tired eyes at nothing in particular, making a respectable attempt at enjoying the rare find that was an in-tact pack of cigarettes and crinkling his brows together in the process.
"Fucking hipsters,"
He growled with a gravelly voice, inhaled one more ragged and hasty drag, and mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the moist ground before he had smoked it even half of the way to the filter. Before extending his legs and standing upright, he considered the light blue pack of Marlboro Smooths once more before tossing it to rest on the tattered remains of what must have once been expensive clothes upon the corpse he had recently incapacitated. Daryl lifted a hand to push a greasy lock of hair back and out of his eyes, and as he stood up he was trying to wrap his head around the appeal of mentholated cigarettes.
"The fuck would ya wanna smoke fuckin' toothpaste,"
He trailed off, his incoherently soft words spoken to no one but the vacant bodies that were scattered around his little portion of the Georgia wilderness. Between the nagging voice in his head that sounded entirely too much like his big brother and the restlessness of having hunkered down at the prison for a while now, Daryl had found sleep unattainable throughout the past few hours; he had let himself silently out the main prison gate well before the day had begun, his only real companion slung snugly over his back and resting between two tensed shoulder blades. Before moving on, he leaned over the cadaver, mutilated by decomposition, and wrenched the aluminum bolt out from the walker's nasal cavity. Daryl plucked a generously-sized leaf from a nearby tree branch and used it to wipe the stink from the shaft of the bolt. He dropped the soiled leaf on the ground and looked at the bolt's faint glow in the thumbnail-moon-lit morning and then slid it back into its home in the quiver that hung next to his crossbow behind him. As he strode away from where the prison loomed brooding and cold, he straightened the colorful poncho he wore over his coat, his pistol holster repositioning itself to properly rest on the crest of his left hip bone. Daryl had heard the dry rasping of the walker long before he could locate it visually through the darkness. In the beginning, it had been easier to smell the walkers coming from further away, with their bodies decaying so rapidly. But at this stage in the game, so much of the world was rotting all at once that it became impossible to use scent to locate the bastards. Once he had found the walker, staggering on flinty legs about two hundred feet into the woods away from the prison, it had only been a matter of aligning it in his sights and releasing the bolt to fling headlong into his target. Daryl had begun walking again, although to where he had no inclination.
As the sun commenced its flamboyant entrance into the day, Daryl had made his way to a thicker part of the woods. The underbrush here was heavy, which translated to a lower likelihood of running into a walker, but also a rougher time getting away from any he encountered. He bet on his chances and picked his way through the brambles, feeling like he was coming towards a break in the trees ahead. He came upon a big pair of blackberry bushes, and his eye caught a particularly plump berry, winking with dew and nestled within the heart of one of the bushes. He leaned forward, stretching his arm far into the bush and snatching the berry up, his arm hastily recoiling. He lost himself for a moment as he greedily sucked the juice from the blackberry, and as he did, his wandering eyes caught an unnaturally large red shape through the brush. He blinked rapidly a few times in succession, then squinted through a gnarl of branches and sticks. Exceptionally clearly, he saw a barn across a small open space from where he hid, and the shape of a person standing in the barn's loft window. Despite his concealment in the brush, he could feel that this person had their eyes right on him. He acted without thinking, and wrenched his crossbow around and up into firing position. As he did, he focused his sight through the scope along the top of the weapon and saw the face of a woman. He looked at her, saw her eyes were green and her coffee-brown hair had been cut very short, and even made out a few freckles across her cheeks. Daryl exhaled, and then fired a shot.
thus completes chapter two. expect another post within the next few hours here, i'm actively working on where the story of these two is going.
review n shit.