WHOA. Okay.
I'd first like to apologize profusely for starting this fic and letting it hang for so long. I just lost my stuff there, for awhile. It happens. Too often.
Second, I want to remind you that this fic is more or less AU at this point, even more so than I'd originally intended. Please keep in mind that the "Everyone is infected" canon is being ignored here, and several of the characters who have since passed in the show are very much alive.
I've decided to place this fic a few months after the group flees the farm. Again, several groupmembers are still breathing.
I hope you continue to be patient with me and certain stories I've struggled with; I hope to get this one going in full force soon!
He could taste vomit in his mouth. Blood. Dirt. It all mixed together into a cocktail of disgust, making his nose wrinkle and his teeth grind.
Daryl stood in the field and stared at his forearm.
A sizable bite had torn skin and flesh from just below his elbow, evidence of his raising his arm to fend off a Walker. Brown mud covered him from head to toe. Dirt mixed with old, dried blood. The bite on his arm was scabbed over, the protective covering large, thick and hard. There was similar one on his shoulder.
Another on his right leg. Three on his left.
Four on his stomach.
He couldn't see his back, but he figured there were just as many there, too.
He lowered the arm, slowly, cautiously, gauging the pain.
He felt plenty, a burning against his skin where it pulled against the scabbing wounds as he moved. His head hurt. Pounded. The throbbing started in the back of his head when he first dared to stand, slowly made its way to the front, into his eyes.
He blinked the blurred vision away.
Inhaled.
Inhaled again.
He was breathing. Alive.
Covered in Walker bites, surrounded by rotting corpses, alone….
And alive.
And he could not, for the life of him, remember how the hell he'd gotten there.
They had stopped again.
Lori had to pee.
Carol stared out the window of the truck and blew hot breath against the glass. Watched as it fogged against the cold. Contemplated reaching up and drawing a heart like a fourteen year-old on a field trip.
They'd been driving for hours since their last stop, an old gas station in the middle of nowhere with nothing to offer but a few rolls of toilet paper from the dirty bathroom.
She watched as Glenn and Maggie got out of the SUV to escort Lori towards the woods. They were on yet another deserted highway, trying to avoid traffic jams and hoping to find somewhere, anywhere, they could call 'safe'.
They thought they'd found it several days before. An empty ghost town with a few decently intact buildings. Enough for them to hole up in for a few months, they thought. They had made the mistake of getting too comfortable too quick.
As she reached up to lay a finger against the glass, she wondered if they should have listened to Shane. He and Rick had argued again. Shane had wanted to keep moving, always moving, until they reached For Benning. Rick wanted to give up the idea of the base being secure or salvageable. They argued over everything. Especially Lori. Especially Carl.
One day, Carol feared the worst would come to the surface in both of them.
Breathing hard against the glass again, she watched it fog up and felt her lip tremble. She drew the heart, smiled grimly at her childishness.
She'd just started learning how to shoot when they lost him.
He almost tripped over his own feet, his legs feeling weak and rubbery.
"Goddammit."
He kicked a nearby Walker, fought the urge to spit on the fucking thing. His skin hurt. His head hurt. A cold breeze was blowing through and he shivered despite himself.
Daryl couldn't remember what had happened to leave him in the field alone, bitten to hell but somehow still breathing, but he couldn't shake the tension in his muscles at the memories that fought to surface.
He could hear the screams in his head.
Someone screaming his name. A woman.
Carol.
Rick's shout reverberated in his skull and seemed to make the headache worse.
It was all he could get, and it pissed him the fuck off.
Beneath his feet the earth was torn to shit. He'd stepped onto a set of deep, aging tire tracks. Whoever had created them—and he could easily guess who—had seemed in a damn hurry to speed off.
Daryl wasn't stupid. He could put the pieces together enough to know they'd been overrun. But what he didn't know was how it had happened, who had survived, and how he was still alive to even fret over it all.
His fingers itched and for what had to be the fifteenth time since he'd woken up, he considered searching the bodies for a gun and blowing his brains out before he turned.
Instead he steadied his feet and started walking, the torn grass and dirt under his boots leading the way.