*I do not own The Walking Dead. It belongs to its rightful owner.*
Chapter 25: Good Guy After All
The next morning – bright and early – we set out.
Daryl rides on the motorcycle; I get in the RV with Dale and Carol – sit in my usual place – and Andrea starts the engine of the nice green car Shane fixed up. Daryl drives in front of the other two vehicles and then the RV jolts forward, for we are moving.
We left a note for Sophia on a lonely, abandoned car – food and water, too.
It seems to me that whenever we move on to another place some kind of message is left behind. The note Rick left back at the quarry for those people, the one we just left for Sophia – it's what we do and it is almost like that one fairytale Hansel and Gretel, where the two kids left the bread crumbs to retrace their steps; find their way home.
The difference here, however, is the messages aren't about us retracing our steps or finding our way home.
They are about others finding us.
The farm that the woman on the horse said to go to – the same person who said that Carl was still alive – is only a few miles away, according to Dale. A few miles isn't that long – maybe five minutes or so – but the boredom eats away at me, and the not long turns into forever.
I gaze out the window while fooling with my hands and picking and chewing at my fingers. No one is here to yell at me to stop, so I don't. The scenery is the same as it's been – same old Georgia. But as we continue further, the surroundings change.
First, we pass through a gate. Daryl gets off of the motorcycle to let us in and closes the silver metal when all of the vehicles pass and he is getting hit with the dust from the back tires. We keep going, driving down a dirt path, and then two fields spring up on either side of the RV. In one field – the one on the right – I see something and I come to realize that it is cattle. Real live cows just grazing in a big group like nothing happened to the world and everything is the same as before. The other field contains green-and-yellow grasses that stand tall and proud, just as the trees do. Around another bend we go and my boredom is non-existent, for I am distracted by the normalness placed here. Buildings pop up, barns and such – farm-like things – and then we are pulling up to a big white house that has a long wooden porch wrapped around it.
The RV stops and it takes a second for me to register that this is exactly real, but then I regain myself and I'm clambering down the RV steps after Dale and Carol. When my foot hits the grass – not highway asphalt or forest floor, but grass – a breeze blows, yeah, a breeze and the gust triggers all of the windmills and wind chimes to go off. This can't be real, but it is, and I like it and, and . . .
It's beautiful.
Beautiful even when the whole world failed us.
People approach us, then, and I recognize Glenn right away because of the baseball cap. Shane is there, too, but he looks weird because his head is all shaved now and he's wearing a pair of baggy overalls. I also don't miss the little limp he does with every step. There are three others with them – two girls and a boy – but I don't know them, so they just blend right in with the crowd. Except that one girl kind of looks like the lady on the horse . . . Maybe –
The farm house's front door bangs open and catches my attention. Rick, Lori, and T-dog – familiar faces – they step out. Along with them is an old man and a woman, more people I don't know. All five of them walk off of the long porch and down the staircase. Nobody says anything and then they stop in front of the group I came with, and the cars. Rick is closest and it is like a standoff, since everyone is silent, an awkward standoff.
"How is he?" Dale asks the burning question.
Lori, well, Lori is smiling and it makes something in me feel good as she nods her head, still smiling. "He'll pull through."
He'll pull through.
So much better . . . so, so much better. A weight has lifted, I let a small sigh out, and I feel better, yeah, I do – just better in general.
Lori has turned and her gaze is on the people behind her, the old man. "Thanks t-to Hershel and – and his people, and – "
"And Shane," finishes Rick. He's not smiling and his face is more serious looking. Rick looks tired, more tired than usual, and his raspy voice suggests this, too. He does a quick look over to Shane, who looks so different and changed, before he's front and center again. "We'da lost Carl if not for him."
Dale pulls Rick into a hug and then some of the others are hugging, too. I stay out of it – the hugging – and someone breathes "thank God". The hugging goes through its course and Dale is asking Rick how it happened – how Carl got shot in the first place. Rick replies with a hunting accident, a stupid one, really, and yeah, hunting with all those guns and stuff – that would do it.
But that doesn't matter – none of it really does to me.
Those are just the little fun facts that aren't even "fun".
Carl is alive. He's not still alive or bleeding out or anything of the sorts. He's okay.
Okay and gonna pull through.
As the morning wears on, I find out the full story – it comes in bits and pieces. I find out about how a man named Otis – one of Hershel's people – shot a deer, but the bullet went into Carl instead. About how Otis – the person who didn't see Carl, but only the deer – and Shane went to a high school last night to get medical supplies to treat Carl. They got the supplies, yeah, they did, but when the car pulled up at the big farmhouse, only Shane got out. And Otis was nowhere to be found.
This story, this explanation, leads me to where I now stand – under a tall oak tree with everyone. It's a memorial – I think that is what it's called when there is no actual body in the flesh – and I clasp my hands in front of me the way my mother showed me, look down at my sneakers and the grass around it. Hershel reads out of a Bible, but I don't catch his words and phrases, for I am lost in thought. There is a rock pile in place of an actual grave and Hershel's people add their own personal rocks to the mound.
Hershel is done reading out of the Bible, now, and he closes the book. His gaze moves on to Shane who looks dazed. "Shane, will you speak for Otis?"
At first, I'm surprised Shane hears him because of the out-of-it look on his face, but he must have heard the old man because he looks down. "I'm not good at it," he whispers. "I'm sorry . . ."
"You were the last one with him," croaks Patricia, Otis' wife. Her eyes are glassy and Maggie – the name of the lady that was on the horse – has her arm around her. "You shared his final moments. Please . . . I need to hear. I need to know his death had meaning."
She looks straight at Shane when she says this. It gets to him and he nods his head; real tiny nod. "Okay . . ." he breathes. Shane stalls for a few moments, looks down at his feet. My mind wanders off to Carl – who is flat-out alive, which makes me happy – but then I reel myself back in because this is a memorial and that is rude. I wipe my palms on my pants because they have started to sweat, Shane talks, "We were about done," he says. He and Otis were close to dying. "Almost out of ammo – we were down to pistols by then. I was limpin', it was bad." Patricia puts a hand up to her mouth; Maggie still has a grip on the woman. Shane says that his ankle was all swollen up. I don't know why, he doesn't say, but it explains why he's limping. "'We've gotta save the boy'. See, that's what he said . . ." Shane starts shaking his head, the memories are coming back. "He gave me his backpack, he shoved me ahead, 'Run', he said. He said, 'I'll – I'll take the rear, I'll cover you'."
Shane looks down once more. I swallow because this is a terrible story, it truly is.
"And when I looked back . . ." Shane trails off, his gaze goes to Patricia. She is crying.
I know what he saw when he looked back.
"If not for Otis," Shane says, limping towards the wheelbarrow with the rocks inside of it. He picks up one. "I'd never made it out alive. And that goes for Carl, too. It was Otis. He saved us both." He looks to Patricia again; her hand is still to her mouth. I wonder if she has the habit of picking at her fingers like I do. "If any death ever had meaning, it was his."
Shane adds the rock to the pile, places it so it fits in like a puzzle piece.
I figured it out, yeah, I did. I was wrong before. Shane isn't bad. He's just rough around the edges, a little hard to understand.
Shane is a good guy.
A good guy after all.
I think.