Hi guys!
Sorry for the late update, I'm moving houses at the minute, lol. Anyway, thanks for all the love, reviews, follows and favourites! ❤️
Brooke contemplated that this was purgatory. That perhaps the religious fanatics were right. That maybe, just maybe, she died and this was punishment for the way she lived her old life.
Her respectable, sinless, old life.
She wondered where the old life ended and when this one began. Not that this was a life. She couldn't really call it that.
This was day after day of agony. This was the unbalanced limbo. Where the dead and the living were no longer black and white, but instead met in a middle ground: an unholy grey. The living dead preying on the dead living.
That's where she was, the figurative middle ground. In reality she was standing, waiting almost, in the snow with a baby strapped to her chest and a man passed out behind her. She had walked away, resolved in her decision to leave him there. He was a liability and liabilities didn't survive.
They just added to the statistic.
But.
Ah, but.
But, but, but, but, but.
But, this man had looked out for her in their fast, and still current, escape. This man was the father of the child she was now stuck with. This man was the only familiar, coherent, if not grammatically ignorant, person from a life she witnessed crumble seconds ago.
Because despite the final months of life at the Base driving her to near suicide, it was a life. Walt was, had been, her family. The people there made it home.
She got what she wanted. She was free of them. Turns out, she was stupid, she was wrong, she bullshitted to herself because she needed to run away.
Walt was right, you can't be alone in a world like this. You'd go mad. She knew she was close to that already, she couldn't let herself go over the edge after forcing herself to survive.
Every damn day was a battle. To lose after something like this, would only be hurting herself even more. She thought she was stonger than that —damnit, she needed to start acting like it.
Starting now.
Fuck the statistics. Fuck the fact they were in the outskirts of town, in the fucking cold, surrounded by fuck knows what. Fuck their lack of food, their next to no ammunition. Fuck the idea of the three of them together sounded like a stupid fucking joke.
A fucking toddler, a crippled hillybilly and a Goddamn nutcase, stranded in the snow during the end of the world.
She wasn't going to die without trying to live first.
Even if this was purgatory.
She turned back, ran over to him and crouched down. She had a hand on Judiths back, patting her up and down for warmth as she shook the man.
"Hey," she said, her voice low, "Not now. Come on, get up."
Nothing. She didn't have many ideas. The woods were quiet, but she reckoned they had about an hour tops before the sun began setting.
He was still breathing. She examined his shirt, checking to see if he was bleeding, which he wasn't. It had been a couple of minutes since he passed out, if he didn't wake up, they be screwed.
She pulled the crossbow off, and turned him on him in his back. A whimper. Definitely not dead. She shook him again.
"Daryl, right? Come on, wake up."
She smacked his face. Nothing. She grabbed at some snow and lay it on his forehead.
No movement.
"Daryl, wake up."
He roused. His mouth opened and she remembered nights when her friends drunk themselves stupid and passed out. She titled his head to the side, got up and moved to his legs, trying to lift the left one with her free hand.
She heard him gasp, jolting a bit before turning his head and looking at her. She let go, pulling him up to a sitting position. Bad idea, he lost balance and nearly fell back if not for her iron grip.
She knelt beside him, eyes scanning around for any unexpected guests. His palms held his head, his eyes closed and his body shaking. They needed to get out of here.
She grabbed his head with her hand so she could have a proper look at him.
"It's okay. Can you move?"
He was disorientated. He was pale. There was no way in hell he could carry the crossbow and the pack and walk and fend anything off.
"W'at happen'd?"
"You passed out. Can you move?"
He nodded. It was a vote of confidence, she pushed the crossbow away as he tried to reach for it. Blue eyes met brown in agitation.
"We're swapping. I'll carry the stuff, you carry Judith. There's a town about forty minutes away that we can stay for the night, but we need to keep moving."
He nodded again. She threw down her pack, opened it and sifted through the drugs she hoarded a couple hours ago. As she sifted, she threw away the ones she didn't know about. At the very bottom was a now ice cold bottle of water. She handed it to him, and watched as he forced himself to remain still, despite the cold, and drink. He passed it to her, she shook her head, throwing a pack of painkillers in his lap and unfastening the sling.
"Take two. I know it's not much, but it's all I've got that I know won't kill you."
She sat Judith on his lap as he swallowed the pills dry before wrapping the baby in her hoodie. She then helped fasten her to the man and grabbed all the packs, bags hanging all over her. The bitch of a crossbow was strapped on her shoulder, and she staggered up.
He looked at her, not too trusting. She didn't blame him. She was going to dump his fucked ass, what, five minutes ago?
"Ya can't carry all that."
She didn't bother arguing, walking forward from him a second time. She heard him get up and she slowed so he could keep up with her. He was slow, this was going to be terrible, she didn't care.
It was silence the whole trip. They encountered several undead, managing not stir any as she lead them through the darkening night. She didn't bother looking at who the victims were, it didn't matter anymore.
It was cold. The baby was going to die and soon if they didn't find someplace safe for the night. The town as per appeared deserted, but she knew, *knew*, that if people had fled the Base they'd have come here.
"Where's safest?"
She looked at him. She wasn't used to being the one to make desicions. People usually expected her to follow, not lead.
He didn't look good though. He was wearing his jacket, if you could call that sleeveless thing a jacket, backwards so to cover Judith. The stitched distressed wings gave the child an ominous rather than sweet comparison to an angel.
She looked ahead, she knew where people would hold. The restaurant at the end, the pharmacy, the 24-hour corner shop. People from the Base may be there.
Then again, so could other people.
Right now, she couldn't risk that. She remembered the library. Perhaps there.
"Follow me."
Another twenty minute walk in the dark. Nothing around. It didn't calm her, opposite in fact.
The library was a modern building. It needed care that no one would ever give it, not anymore. The thing she liked most about it was it's pull doors.
The entrance, the bathrooms, the quiet study areas, nothing came in. Nothing undead anyway, they couldn't pull anything. When they first discovered it, there had been only one turned. It was safe. Or well, she thought so.
It was a far enough point in town to be both out of the way but direct to everything. She walked in, opened the door and turned on the flashlight. No one was here.
After dragging them both up a flight of stairs between the travel literature and the transport section. She dumped everything on the ground, checked the windows, the bathrooms and the halls, before pushing a desk in front of the door to the second floor stair case.
She grabbed a metal bin on her way back and placed it between her and the now seated man and baby. He was going to go again, she could tell. He was on the verge of passing out. He watched her, his face slack, his hands loosely curled around his child's frame, his eyes holding bags that were deep purple and heavy, as she ripped the pages from the countless books around them, grabbed a match from her pack and lit a fire.
Orange flames engulfed beiged paper. Light and warmth fluttered against their faces, down their bodies, into their souls. It flushed any remenents of the cold, and she felt her wet clothes drying, uncomfortably, from so little exposure. It was then, and only then, did she sit herself down.
She was opposite him. His breathing laboured, a slow rising and falling from his chest. Judith was quiet, but not asleep. His hands holding her frame, gently kneading the ridges of leather smooth on her back.
"W'at happen'd?"
She pulled over the bag full of baby things, her back still sore from lugging everything for so long. She looked at the clothes they had for the child, opting to put a couple more layers on her to keep her warm.
"I don't know. I was on a run. When I came back a bunch of them were blocking the road. I waited, got to camp as fast as I could, and found it over run."
"And Judith? Ya left her?"
No venom in his tone. This was a recollection. A retelling of sorts.
"I wasn't taking her along. Sylvia, the lady watching her, she was alive when I got back. She told me she stuck Judith in the closet. When I went to get her I heard one grab her, then I got in the closet and locked it. I was going to wait it out, and then," she eyed him, "That's when you came."
The soft crackling of burning pages accompanied his grunt, "Doors where open. Heard walkers from outside my door, sorted them out and foun' him there."
"Walt?"
"Mm."
Walt. He wouldn't stand a chance with those things. It didn't matter about his training, about the people he treated in the war zones he was shipped to. Walt panicked when he was faced with them. She thought it had to do with the inhumanity of it all.
"Was it bad?" she curled her knees by her chest, grabbing at them as a substitute security blanket, "Did they, God, did it look-"
"'S o'er now. Don' need to ask that."
Tone stiff, face stoic. Regardless of the pain, he'd said that with a firm voice. Too firm.
It was bad. Course it was. Sylvia had been ripped in two, her blood stained in between the creases of Brooke's palms.
"He ain't one of them."
She paused her musings, "What?"
"Ya friend. He ain't one of them. One o' the walkers. Made sure."
The expression was foreign. Walkers. She knew what he was saying though.
Walt wasn't wondering out in the snow, guts trailing close behind him, searching for some poor bastard to rip apart with his rotting hands. His face wasn't eating away at decaying flesh, consuming everything from meat to bone. He was dead, body stiff from a fresh case of rigour mortis.
It nearly drove her to tears. She had to do her very best to not lose it there and then. All at once a nauseating mixture of sentiment, a select complicated swirl of emotions flourished inside of her. She was devastated, so full of grief and anger and inconsolable sadness, and yet, knowing that, knowing this stranger had done that, gave her an incomparable sense of relief.
It was touching. Sickening, but touching.
She swallowed the forming bump in her throat, lips dry and coarse as she pulled herself tighter.
"Thank you." She said.
Two words that were uttered so easily, but carried more weight than any of the packs she dragged around today. He didn't say anything, he just sat there.
Nothing else was said. She watched as he slowly lost the battle of wakefulness to sleep. Judith was snoring softly, the streets were quiet, the snow still fell.
She didn't sleep during the night. She wouldn't this night on principal.
Gifted with a frail state of privacy, she buried her face between her hands and cried. Her whimpers quiet. Another sound to add to the silence.
