Title: Walking Shadows

Chapter 4

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: When the world as he knows it ends, Daryl Dixon relies on a most unlikely ally to survive.

Author's note: See the caveats from Chapter 1. So many thanks for reading, and for being there.


/-/-/-/-/


"What the hell you been doing, little brother?"

Rough hands herd them into a dark space. Carey stumbles and Gray reaches for her. They form a core around her, as if she is the axis of their universe. Perhaps she is, the only stable element left in a cosmos of chaos.

They've been brought here, roughly, to a Walmart on the outskirts of Dahlonega, about 50 minutes by truck from Covenant City. She can tell this by the way shadows fall, or at least she used to. That was a long time ago, and now all she's measured has been how quickly darkness fell over DC from her office window (assuming that the capitol wasn't perpetually that way).

They are pushed inside like the captives they are, and Gray blinks until her eyes adjust.

The retail space has been cleared out. Clothes racks and shelving has been bulldozed into unruly piles on the edges of the building, pushed like snow from a plough, leaving only the dirt and salt-grit behind. In the shadows she sees the flash of plastic wrappers, the shine of DVDs and boxes of laptop computers, smart phones, microwaves, and blenders – all those things that are no longer useful.

Now tents have been erected, camp stoves, and there are five tanker trucks of fuel parked in the center.

It's surreal, and disorienting, except so much of life since then has been that she almost doesn't feel it.

A generator revs and light flares up, stadium bulbs strung over tent poles. It's blinding, but through it, she sees him, she sees Daryl stand roughly, balancing the crossbow on his hip.

"Surviving," he answers.

"Shit." He (Merle? Daryl had called him) spits and wipes at his nose. "Ain't that the truth."

Gray understands that he must be Daryl's brother but she can't see the resemblance. He's big and he throws around the bulk of his body like he can boss people about, but the years of that are coming to an end, she can see the flab of his skin, the paste and glue color of it under his racist tattoos, the blurry number of them. Sweat pours off his brow, beneath the shaved lines of his head. His eyes glitter, and she's seen that kind of look before, the kind that's only made by certain powdery substances.

She's become used to Daryl, the underdogness of him, tough and tensile. This man is none of those things, and she understands that very clearly.

He also has only one hand. The other is a blunt stump above the wrist.

Merle turns from Daryl and looks at her.

"Now who's this?"

He comes over and stands in front of her. He sniffs her and for once she isn't sorry she stinks of sweat and dirt. He yanks the rubber band from her hair and twines his hand, the one he still has left, though it. She forces herself to stand impassively as he does. Behind her she can hear the whimper of Carey and Mason, and she stands taller.

"What do you want with us?"

"Well now, that depends." The words twirl out of Merle's mouth.

"We're just trying to survive."

She keeps her words purposely neutral, but they sound more like an excuse than exculpatory.

Merle smiles and his face turns grotesque with the movement. He leans against her and she can smell the sourness of his breath as he touches her cheek with the roughness of the stump, the scabbed place where his hand once was. She doesn't flinch.

"Aren't we all?" he tells her as he pulls her against him, and it sounds like the threat it is.

Merle pushes her away and appraises the others, thumbing at his nose.

"Tie 'em up," he says.

Two men, hard and lean, come towards her, and anger flares, sharp and sudden, at this treatment.

"Wait a minute – "

The blow takes her unaware, which is unusual. She realizes that's because she never expected Daryl to hit her.

She touches the corner of her jaw gingerly, feeling the chomp and gash her teeth made in the gum of her cheek. She doesn't know what hurts worse, the shock or the pain, and she rushes towards him without thinking, not quite sure what part she's aiming for. He's surprised by the suddenness of it – as well he should be, she thinks, fucking prick – and she gets in one solid fist against his chin before something hits her hard on the back of the head.

She can feel herself falling but she is oddly weightless, powerless to keep the concrete floor from colliding with her body. It's cool against her cheek and almost welcome, but Merle jerks her back to her feet, and she feels the tip of his gun under her chin. He presses upward, as if he could jam it through her jaw straight into her brain.

Devon begins to scream. It sounds more like wailing and it echoes.

"Shut up!" Merle and Daryl say together.

But she doesn't. Devon's never been a strong one.

Gray turns but Merle's quicker. The screaming stops, and the only sound is the ricochet of the bullet on corrugated steel. Gray freezes as she feels the wet spray of it on her face. The last time that happened –

"Christ, I like it when they fight back," Merle says.

He kicks a piece of skull and it skitters across the floor.

Daryl balances, then lunges. "Fuck – "

Merle laughs and motions at them. The men come forward again and knot cords around Lilou's and Carey's wrists, around Mason and Cass, around Chas.

"What you waitin' for, little brother?" Merle asks. He leans back, gun on his hip.

Daryl stares at him and then comes towards her like a shadow.

"You're just going to let him do this?" Daryl says nothing as he lashes plastic zip ties around her wrists. There is a burn in his eyes more bitter than anything. The Daryl she knew, laconic and cocksure, is gone. This one is different, ignorant, mean, cruel. He's not just rough around the edges, she thinks, he's positively fucking jagged. She's not often wrong about people, and this transformation – transmogrification – takes her unaware. It feels sharp, it feels wrong. It feels like being betrayed, and she hates it.

Merle laughs as she sinks back to the floor. She feels tired now, like the darkness of the world is pushing her over its edge. She tastes blood on her tongue, the copper-pipe taste of it, and wonders if it is her own or if it is Devon's.

"What should we do with them?"

Daryl's voice is cold.

"Do what you want."


/-/-/-/-/


She doesn't know how long she's out, but there's a great slam and commotion as others come in. Gray can hear Merle's voice as he goes to them. They've been here two days now, and there's a constant stream of men moving in and out. There are so many of them, moving like ants, constantly bringing in supplies. They go out daily, bringing back what they find, although much of it is porn magazines, gold jewelry, bank-bound bundles of money, and other flashy things.

Merle greets them by name as they come in, Burke, Powell, Rosco, Jenkins, Dayton. Lucky, Tayler, Sheridan. Rusty.

They're all big men with corroded names and shifty eyes. They have twitchy fingers, and hot tempers. She recognizes the way these people walk, the way they move. She's seen plenty of them before – racists, mercenaries, survivalists, conspiracy nuts. These are the people who have survived.

Oh brave new world, she thinks bitterly.

She struggles to sit upright. Her head's still pounding, and it feels like she's been run through a meat grinder. Lilou and Carey sit near her, Cass and Mason and Chas farther off. She feels the emptiness, the space where Devon should be, and she feels like crying.

Mason moves over to sit beside her as if he isn't scared, and she thinks again that he's a plucky little thing.

"Merle!" someone calls out. "We got more walkers on the perimeter."

"Shoot 'em," someone else says.

"Too many this time."

Voices curse, loudly.

"That's enough," Merle's voice drowns out the commotion. "We need to leave. I've been saying that for weeks now."

Gray watches as two distinct factions come together by the tents. She hears the raised voices, the itching for a fight, but she sees something else too. She sees another group of men, maybe four or five, come behind them. One walks with a limp, favoring his left leg, and that injury looks new. But she keeps her eyes on the tall one, the one they call Rusty, holding the top of his arm. She can see there's a wound there, but by the way he's wincing, it should be deep enough to bleed.

And yet, all she can see is a halo of pus around it.

"I say we go to Macon." Merle raises his voice and it echoes in the closed space.

"And I say we stay here," Burke replies. "We don't know what's in Macon, if there's even anything at all."

Merle shakes his head. "Too many walkers here. They're coming out of the cities now."

"But here we have supplies," Tayler argues back. "Here we have a base."

Daryl fidgets, and Merle notices. "Something you want to say, Darlena?"

"Man has a point."

Gray listens to them argue back and forth, but she's looking at the floor, at the way the blood there has dried maroon now. It will soon flake off, peeling away from the linoleum until there is nothing there but a faint stain.

"You should listen to him," she says.

Merle turns first. She isn't sure who's more surprised that she speaks up, him or her.

"What do you know about it, sugar tits?"

His chin, grizzled with stubble, juts out. There's a spider-sharp glint in his eyes, and she can see traces of white power under his nose.

"I know there's nothing there."

"And how would you know?"

"How do you think, you ignorant inbred hick." Gray glares, her voice gurgles. "Because I was there."

She can see that Daryl expects Merle to snap, but he doesn't. She knows he won't, not when he wants to know what she has to say, even if she doesn't want to say it.

"I was sent," she tells him. "There was a special task force, chosen in the first days of the outbreak, hand-picked of people who could do whatever it took to stop it. We were sent to every state with a major outbreak." She shrugs and the movement hurts. "I was sent to Georgia."

She watches the faces of those around her and tries to label the emotions on them, fear, curiosity, sadness, indifference. Now that she's started, people crowd around to hear her, and she continues as if she's been waiting to tell someone this for ages. It's as if something's broken in her, something she isn't sure will ever go back.

"It was our job to keep the infected isolated," she explains. "And we did. We treated them, we quarantined them. And in the end, we killed them."

She looks at Daryl, but he doesn't look at her.

"We were overrun too quickly," she says. "Not as quickly as other states, but fast enough. We couldn't keep up with the turnover rate, especially in the cities. Before communications went down, we were told to take extreme measures, and we did."

"Any place with a turn-over rate of 54% was targeted," she explains and in her head she hears the thrum of helicopter blades taking off.

"Targeted?" Cass asks her. "With what?"

She remembers the way Atlanta was overrun, the way DC was coming apart even before she left, the terrible way the military camps went down almost before they went up. She remembers the hospitals, the internments, the exterminations they became. She remembers the faces of panic, the screams, the firebombings in the cities, the orders she issued with the best of intentions and the helter-skelter way they were carried out.

"Whatever we had," she answers and she thinks of the fires. "Augusta, Athens, Albany," she has to take a breath. "Columbus, Savannah. Macon."

"Atlanta never went above 30%," she says. "Not until the last days, and by then we couldn't get hard numbers. By then we couldn't do anything."

There is a terrible silence now and it reels around them as her words sink in.

"Why you?" someone ventures.

She understands what they are asking. She's used to the question, to being underestimated and pushed around. But she's learned to push back.

"I trained with Syracuse," she says simply. "You know what that is right?"

Several nods their heads, but most look confused, as if they think it's a city in New York.

Jesus.

"All those missions in Iraq, Afghanistan?" she asks them. "What do you think they were based on?"

"Stupidity?" someone volunteers.

"Intelligence," Gray counters. "That was my job. I worked missions in Afghanistan for three years, and then I came back here to plan them."

Now Daryl stares at her like the rest of them, in a cold horror that is far worse than any punch could have been. But she's used to that by now, or she should be. It hurts far less than it should. At least, from everyone but him, but that terrible look in his bayou eyes.

"I made a living killing people," she admits. "But you, you people, you do it for fun."


/-/-/-/-/


They sit in silence, waiting.

Merle's off arguing with someone. She can head the strident tones of his voice above all others.

They look at her differently now, her group and theirs, as if she is the one that caused this whole catastrophe, as if she is the winged angel of death that brought it all raining down on their heads. But she certainly never wanted this, this contagion and chaos, this heartbreak of death and unstoppable disease. She doesn't meet their eyes because she no longer knows what people see in her, she no longer wants to know. She no longer knows what she sees in herself.

She feels herself cracking, breaking apart, as it comes back to her.

When she remembers DC, she remembers who she was. Sometimes she thinks she can't remember, but then it all comes back so sharply that she nearly doubles with the pain of it.

She misses a world where things made sense. She misses the wildness of the world, the kind she learned when she worked for Syracuse those first years in Afghanistan, where poppies were the color of burn, where she met Bryan. They were on the same team and she fell in love with him without meaning to, that intense and irrevocable way people do in war zones. She was young, fresh off a Master's degree and a chance, and he was not. She was as green as her eyes when she came, but he taught her and she learned.

He showed her how to read signs of presence in the sand, how to follow invisible tracks into the mountains. He showed her how to tell time by the sun and the shadows, how to find water in the desert, how to talk to the people who lived there. He taught her how to think around corners, how to forget her own life and focus on others. He taught her how to understand what others were thinking, even before they knew, and how to always plan for the unexpected. He taught her how to stand on her feet as if she was always moving forward, because she was. He taught her how to survive.

She remembers the day was bright with sun, the kind that warmed but didn't burn. They were coming in from Charikar, heading towards Kabul. Behind them the Panjshir Valley spread like velvet , where the Shamali plains met the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Grapes bloomed in the sun, their dark skins reflecting the light. She could smell clay on the air, the kind the locals shaped and fired into colorful pottery.

She was laughing about something, she doesn't remember what, when the sand in front of them rose like a geyser. Bryan slammed on the brakes and she hit the dashboard, her wrist taking the blunt force of it. She remembers the screaming coming from the car in front of them, the bright bloom of fire that rocketed the vehicle into the air.

She remembers Bryan calling out – getdowngetdowngetdown – as a noise like screaming angels filled her ears. He threw himself towards her, but all she sees is a red blur, and when he falls on her, his weight is limp and heavy. She is screaming, she remembers, screaming at the rippling pain of what feels like a thousand nails scraping into her skin. But then the world goes silent, it goes dark, and she goes with it.

She wakes four days later in a military hospital in Ramstein, Germany. She wakes in a swathe of bandages that cover 56 shrapnel wounds across her back. They tell her she is alive, and that with physical therapy she will be fine. They tell her to be calm and not to worry. They finally tell her that it was a coordinated IED attack. Then they tell her that Syracuse has arranged everything, her leave, her transfer, her new position in DC when she is up to it. At last they tell her Bryan is dead. They try to tell her it is alright.

She hates it, the new city, her job, the way no one tells her what to do. But this, this, she realizes is her first lesson in surviving. Adjust to your circumstances, Bryan taught her, because they certainly won't adjust to you.


/-/-/-/-/


"I need to pee," she announces.

Lilou and Carey avert their eyes. Only Cass and Chas meet them.

"Now!" she orders, and her voice takes on a tone she hasn't heard in a long time, a time when she was in control, when she knew what she was doing.

Rusty jerks like a fish on a reel, and then yanks her to her feet and marches her out the freight doors. They open on a loading area. Dumpsters and two jack-knifed trailers litter the lot. Behind it a field of weeds sways in the wind, edged with ribbons of black landscaping plastic and molding hay bales. Beyond it a corn field shivers, bound by a single line of trees, their leaves orange and red, the bright color of fire.

She doesn't have to pee, but she squats behind a stack of cardboard anyway. She manages to work her pants down with her tied hands, and then she looks over the landscape, measuring.

"Done yet?" Rusty stares down at her.

She rises slowly, pulling up her clothes.

"Fuck you," she says.

"Love to," he answers and slams her against the wall. Her head snaps back against the concrete and she feels the wet scratch of it which means she will be picking scabs out of her hair for weeks, if she lives that long.

Rusty pushes towards her, but she twists and jams her elbows into his ribs. She hears the satisfying squelch of air as he sinks to his knees, gasping. He clutches for her, but she dodges. She swings and hits out but only catches his arm. Her fists slip down his bicep.

He yelps and grabs not for her but his arm.

Her hands comes away bloody and she looks at the black-green-red color of it.

"Shit – "

She backs up but he moves quicker than she could have thought. He grabs her by the leg, and her knee goes backward. She cries out as she goes down, as he pins her.

His eyes are wild against the pallor of his skin, the bloodlessness of it. Drool leaks out of the side of his mouth. She can smell white liquor on his breath, and worse, the rotten stink of something deeper, something worse.

"What the fuck – "

A thick boot kicks out and Rusty rolls off her. He struggles up and whips out his gun.

Daryl stares down it impassively.

Rusty spits. "Stupid bitch."

He lunges for her, but Daryl pushes him back. Rusty stumbles and almost falls but he catches himself just in time. He straightens and slicks a hand through his hair, and then the door slams as he leaves.

Daryl turns to her and she glares at him.

"You want a piece of this too?" The wind is blowing against them and she can smell the sweat of him. God only knows what he's shot in his veins or snuffled up his nose like his brother, although he has a look in his eyes that's nothing but sober. "Or did you come for something else?"

"Gray – "

"Why?" she asks and anger brews dark and strong in her voice. "Why are you letting this happen?"

"What did you think was gonna happen?" Daryl asks her roughly. "We ride off into the sunset? We live the fairy tale? There are no fucking fairy tales."

"So that how it's going to be?" she asks him. "Or is that how it's always been?"

Daryl says nothing, but he doesn't have to.

"That's what this is about, isn't it?" she asks. "Everything's always been about Merle, hasn't it?"

His face tightens, and she can see she's hit a nerve, finally.

"All your life Merle's made the choices for you, hasn't he?" she asks. "Well, that's convenient, isn't it? You don't have to feel a damn thing, do you? No harm, no foul? You don't have to feel guilty because you can just blame it on him."

"Shut up – "

" – or what?" she interrupts. "You'll hit me again?" She looks straight into his bayou eyes. "That's certainly preferable to what he'll do to us. Or don't you care about that? You gonna stand by while he fucks our brains out, or only when he blows them out?"

Daryl pushes himself up in her face, and she feels the anger of him – well, shit, now they are on the same page – but she doesn't move back. She can feel his breath on her face, the closeness of him, the burn. For a second she thinks he might hit her (again), but he doesn't.

"That's enough!" he shouts at her.

"Is it?" she asks.

Somehow it seems like they are fighting about something far different, and maybe that's why it hurts more. It feels like they are trying to hurt each other, not because they can, but because they have been.

"Don't think you know me," he says and his voice is vicious.

"Oh, I don't."

He stands in front of her, and she remembers thinking that he wasn't very big in Franklinburg but that he was solid, something she bet people regretted when they ran into. Now she regrets it.

"Merle saved me," Daryl tells her.

"Really?" she asks him. "Did he? Or did you save him?"

"He saved me," Daryl says again.

"So did I."

She's known rough people before, Bryan, the leaders at Syracuse, the warlords in Afghanistan who ruled over the poppy fields. But the roughness of his hands, of his words, hurts more than she could have imagined. This betrayal hurts far worse than anything else.

"I should have let you die," she says, and her voice is cold and brittle.

Daryl drags her into the building.

"Go to hell," he says to her.

"Already there," she replies.


/-/-/-/-/


She's on her own now, no less and no more than she was before.

Gray realizes this.

All her life she's had to work on her own, and this is no different. She's knows that those who survive are the ones that help themselves, and she won't let these people die here for nothing, not when they've come through so much so far. She won't let what happened to Devon happen to anyone else, she owes them that, she owes herself, and she knows she can't wait for help, or at least, not the help she thought he'd have been.

Fucking Daryl.

She's saved his redneck ass twice, and she can see that he won't bother to save hers. She's angry, and she knows it. But she lets the anger drive her, mobilize her.

The sun is rising, and she can see the texture of the shadows change. Someone calls out in their sleep, and she can hear the echo of footsteps, of someone moving around. There are a few women who crawl in and out of the tents, scrawny and demoralized. She's heard the men talking, stories of what happens here, the horror of it. She doesn't have to guess what will happen to them, to herself and Lilou and Carey, if they stay.

Suddenly there is a commotion, a string of panicky curses and fear rife in the air.

"What is it?" someone calls out.

"It's Rusty," returns a stricken voice. "He's a walker!"

She knew it was only a matter of time. The shouts and cries echo. In the chaos she takes the lighter from Chas' hand, the silver one with the initials that aren't his. She uses the distraction and goes quickly, moving towards the shadows of the trucks, the leaking wetness of the floor she saw when Daryl pulled her back in the building yesterday.

She thumbs the lighter, the ratchet-click of the flame bursting out as she drops it onto the trail of gas.

The blaze goes much quicker than she thought, and the explosion sends her flying even as she runs backwards, a hot wave pounding her into the concrete. Her knee twists underneath her, and she cries out in pain.

She rolls and watches a sea of fire consume the ceiling. Metal rains over her, shrapnel dinging into the floor like hail. Something notches her arm, and she feels the singe of blood.

Across the way she hears Merle screaming. Daryl yells something back but she can't distinguish his words. The world flares before her and she pushes herself to her feet.

Chas has already managed to free his one hand, and he breaks apart her wrists when she comes to him, then he helps free Mason and Cass. She finds Lilou and Carey huddled together, and pulls apart the ropes binding their hands.

There is burst of gunfire and a rash of screams, and then a second tanker goes up in a whoosh of burning fuel.

Men are streaming towards the front doors, Merle and Daryl among them. In the front lot she can see a wave of walkers coming towards them, freed from the confines of the perimeter fences. She doesn't know if they've broken through or been set upon them, but she yells for the group to move and they do, but the ceiling collapses, barring the way. Lilou is wailing now, nearly shrieking, and the sound jars in her ears. Gray turns and smacks her hard across the face. Her palm stings, but it shocks the woman, and she snaps out of it.

She hustles them backward, picking up a gun as she goes. She knows where she is going now, where they have to go, but it takes time to get there. The building is exploding around them, fire spurting across the line of tents, demolishing the careful stockpiles of supplies. She hears the screams of men, the snarl of walkers, and she pushes them forward.

They burst into the grey light of the loading docks. A storm ripples overhead, dark clouds scudding across the sky. Wind ripples the tall grasses.

She leads them to one of the jack-knifed trailers. Its doors blow open and creak in the wind. The emptiness of the space echoes as they climb in. She boosts Mason up.

"Stay here," she says. "Wait until I'm gone, and then find a truck. Get out of here."

She can hear Mason calling her as she goes, but the sound is cut off abruptly. She doesn't stop. She knows Cass will hold him tight, that he and Chas will help get the others out.

She hits the edge of the back lot at a full run and turns, pivoting on her feet. Walkers are coming now, a full horde of them. They stagger as they come around the corner, slowing and scattering like buckshot. She raises her arms in the air, waving, and shouts. She gathers them, trains their sights on her, on a target. It draws their attention, and they turn towards her.

Shit.

She starts running.

The lot is thick with weeds. The soil is dry with drought and crumbles underfoot. Goldenrod and asters lash at her as she goes. A briar catches at her feet and she can feel the bright rip of it against her shin. She stumbles – her knee twinges and she cries out – but doesn't go down.

She stops and looks back. Most of them have followed her, but a group remains idling on the lot, moving towards the trailer. She pulls out the gun and fires, once, then twice. They look and then they come.

Behind her she can hear the rumble of thunder, and the stutter of walkers in the field. The leaders are closing in now, and she aims – one, two, three, go down. It's not enough, but it buys time, and when she starts running again, she knows this will be the last time. They are her last shots, and she hasn't even saved one for herself.

At the edge of the field, the weeds peter out into corn. The summer drought has stunted the stalks, and the brown-crinkle leaves are sharp as knives against her arms as she goes. Gold kernels flash at her as she passes.

She zig-zags, pushing through the rows. Her breath pounds in her chest, her knee flares with every step. Stalks of corn snap as she passes, their tassels rattling like sabers, like teeth.

She can hear the walkers coming, the crash and crush of them as they flatten the crop behind her.

She doesn't want to stop – it's against everything in her – but she knows she can't keep going. Her heart pounds, her breath stabs in her chest. Sooner or later, she will slow, they will catch up, and it will be over. She knows this. She hates it, but she knows it.

Then she hits something, or rather, something hits her.

She falls hard. A rock jams against her ribs, and clay dust fills her mouth as she gasps for air. She gags and a hand covers her face.

Panic surges, and she fights back. She kicks and twists, but she is pinned, pushed into the crumbling soil so the tentacle-like spread of corn roots bite into her shoulder. Something holds her tight, pinching into her, and she waits only for the sink of teeth into her flesh.

This is it, she thinks, this is the way the world ends.


/-/-/-/-/


.