The first mile was the hardest. She kept thinking that she should have said goodbye to Beth and Shane who she had formed possible friendships with. She very much regretted leaving Daryl with no notice or reason. He'll think I left because of him. He'll blame himself. She tried to shake those feelings. They made her weak. She should have never opened up to any of them, never let her guard down. She should be paying attention to the noises around her, not the nagging feelings in her heart. Those people were gone. There was nothing left to dwell on. She sighed and tried her best to shrug it all away.
"You want to try a little run, Panda-rama?"The dog looked up at her with eager eyes. Lucy broke into a light jog, nothing that would stress the dog's healing wound too much.
They finally stopped at a four-way intersection. Lucy wasn't sure which way to go. She had done her best to memorize Dale's road map when no one was looking, even made a few sketches for reference, but none of that would help her here. She supposed it didn't really matter. She had an equal chance of running into danger. She turned West, in an effort to avoid the major cities – which, if her experience in Atlanta taught her anything, was probably overrun with Bobby's. She figured if it was clear, she could take Highway 27 straight to Tennessee with nothing but small towns along the way. If she could find a car and some gas along the way, even better. Chances were slim, she knew. She didn't know how to hot wire and from the chit-chat she had overheard on the farm, nearly every vehicle they'd come across had been siphoned clean. Still, she held out some hope.
She came upon her first sign of civilization just before dusk – though civilization might have been pushing it. The place was a ghost town. After scouring the local pharmacy, liquor and grocery stores, she decided to hole up in the Sheriff's office. She could think of no safer place than the jail cell. She found the keys on the body of a headless deputy. Someone had been here, she realized. Someone had killed these walkers. Lucy locked herself and Pandora in the lone cell and they waited for daylight.
It must have been after midnight when she was woken by the sound of a roaring engine and the glare of a vehicles high beams. She debated if she should get out of the cell or not. Bobby's didn't drive so it had to be humans and humans, she knew, could be worse than the undead. She decided that the safest place for them was locked behind the thick steel bars. She took out her shotgun and aimed it toward the only entrance. The anticipation was worse than anything to come. Her heart raced, thundering in her chest, her ears, behind her eyes – a fear induced headache. The front door creaked. The hanging bells rang. Someone whispered a profanity at the pitiable alarm. The beams of a flashlight moved haphazardly along the walls and floor, dancing it's way closer to her until the source turned the corner and rested directly on her, blinding her in the darkness. Though she couldn't see her target, she aimed her shotgun in it's general direction, resting the barrel on the gate of the cell, between the bars.
The stranger laughed. "Lucy?" She knew the voice but it took her terrified brain a moment to place it. It was Daryl. He turned the flashlight on himself for confirmation. "It's me."
Lucy nearly vomited with relief. She was sick of fighting and realized too late that a jail cell was probably not a very safe place to get caught, especially by humans who could simply shoot her dead before she could even see them.
"Daryl. Thank god."
He let down his own guard as well and approached the cell. "You locked yourself in here?! Where are the keys?" Lucy slipped him the keys and he went to unlocking the gate.
"What the hell are you doing here?" She asked, confused again at his behaviour. One minute he was glad to see her, the next he was pushing her away. Now he was likely here to save her and she had no idea why.
"Here to bring you back, crazy. What in the hell were you thinking, taking off like that?" Behind him something snarled, then growled. It was getting closer. He heard it, she heard it. Neither could admit it until he had opened the gate. Lucy pulled him inside. He slammed the gate shut, turned the key and they both fell back onto the center of the concrete floor. Slowly bringing the flashlight up, they saw the decaying morbid corpse uselessly clawed at the bars, reaching through for the fresh meat that it smelled inside.
In the darkness, Daryl and Lucy looked at each other. They didn't need light to know what the look on the others face was saying but Daryl said it anyway. "Close one."
"Yeah," Lucy breathed.
Together, they stood up. Daryl took out a good sized knife and drove it into the top of the creature's skull until all that was visible was the hilt. The thing fell, it's weight pulling it's head from the blade that impaled it.
"You think there's more?"
"Probably heard me drive up. We won't know until daylight. We'll have to spend the night."
They sat in awkward silence for a long time – neither of them able to admit how glad they were to see the other. Lucy handed him a half a can of cold spam. He ate it greedily and made a show of licking his fingers and smacking his lips when he was done.
"I'm not going back with you, Daryl."
"Oh yeah, and why's that?" His tone was cocky and defiant, the kind you would use on a stubborn child. It made Lucy all that much more determined to disobey him.
"I'm heading North. I've got a plan."
"A plan, huh," he said, scathing with sarcasm.
She fumed. Who was he to demean her, when he didn't even know what she meant to do? She had gotten herself this far. Who was he to mock her? "Whatever. In the morning, I'm moving on."
More awkward silence passed.
"You could come with me, you know."
"Where? North?" He was still mocking her, almost chuckling when he said the words.
"You want specifics? Fine. I'm gonna make my way to Canada. As far North as I can get. I figure if I keep heading North West, I can make Winnipeg by December. Sooner with a vehicle."
He did chuckle then. "You think the weather will freeze them out. Kill them."
"Well, it's not like they're smart enough to bundle up."
"It's a pipe dream, honey. You'll never make it out of Georgia. Even if you did, even if you made it to the Canadian border, what makes you think there aren't any other survivors? What makes you think it's not being guarded? Maybe Georgia is the worst of it. Maybe the rest of the country is still in good shape."
"If that were true, they would have quarantined the whole state, bombed everything. Still, it's a risk I'm willing to take. It's better than waiting it out in some backwoods farmhouse, praying and hoping that everything's gonna be okay while people get picked off, one by one, or die of starvation when the food runs out."
Daryl didn't answer. She made too much sense and he didn't like it. Leaving with her meant leaving the rest of them behind. Not that he would ever admit to having any emotional ties to those people back at the farm. Still, he was torn. Lucy's plan made too much sense to dismiss it outright and waiting at the farm had always been suicide in his opinion but there would never be any hope of convincing the others of it. So why wasn't he jumping on the Canadian bandwagon? The world was over, it was every man for himself. He had made no promises to Rick or Carol or any of them. He was free to leave, to choose his own path. Had he been with them so long that he was afraid to be alone again? Did he need the company, even if he pretended to do everything in his power to separate himself from them? Thoughts and plans and what if's plagued him the rest of the night.
