Hours. Hours and hours I was out searching for him, trying to track him down before a walker dug its claws into his neck. I must have been looking for him because I was so angry with myself for dropping Lori in it, and for bringing it up so abruptly with him. I hated the fact that it was me that had upset the moment of peace in the shit-storm apocalypse, so at least by getting him back to the house in one piece I could say that I sort of made amends.
I didn't know what mood he'd be in when I found him, if I found him, so I'd spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to say when I caught up with him. If I caught up with him. I paced through the forest as it rapidly lost light to the setting of the evening sun, not calling his name in case I attracted the attention of other things. As more tears ran down my face at the dire situation I found myself in, I wished to be anywhere but traipsing through a dirty forest wearing bloodstained clothes, and above all I wished that I'd paid more attention when Daryl tried to explain tracking to me. My arrogance and fatigue had come back to bite me in the ass as I helplessly trawled the cold, darkening woods for the closest thing I had to a best friend.
I stumbled through the forest as it got darker and darker, heart racing a million miles a minute in fear with sweat dripping down my forehead and onto my shoulders, soaking and freezing my shirt. I panted heavily with the effort of clambering over roots and bushes to get back to the house before the walkers became aware of my presence but as I staggered through the dense, freezing undergrowthI heard a noise that startled and stopped my dead in my tracks. It was a heavy, ragged breathing; much like my own but more desperate, and for the first time since I'd left the house I hoped and prayed that I hadn't found Daryl.
As I cautiously picked my way through the unyielding branches and roots, my ankle became tangled in something and I tripped and came crashing down a steep bank and finally landed with a sickening crunch in a freezing cold stream. An agonising pain shot through my side and I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw, trying to fight off the pain. I gasped in pain when I realised there was no point in fighting it, so I tried to ride it out, writing around in agony. I gingerly fumbled around my side until I came to the source of my discomfort; the scarred tissue on my side had split open and right at the edge of the wound there were a few chunky sticks lodged in the dark red blood that was slowly oozing from the reopened wound. I took a deep breath and howled with pain, hoping for a walker to come and finish me off before I passed out from the pain. The contrast of cold air on my burning hot face was uncomfortable and there was moisture forming on my face from my breath which chilled my face even further. Hot tears streaked down my face as I cradled my wound, still laying in the cold water that was flecked with ice and I howled one more time until my lungs were tight and my throat was sore.
Through my pain, I heard something step towards me. The footsteps were too assertive to be those of the dead, so for a shining second I thought that Daryl had found me before a walker had, and that we'd go back to the house and everything would be okay. I rolled my eyes to look up at the person coming towards me, and to my complete horror it wasn't Daryl.
It wasn't a walker. It was a survivor.
A tall, balding, overweight man wearing nothing but a pair of tattered and worn denim dungarees stood over me with a double barrelled shotgun in one hand, and the severed hand of a walker in the other.
I take back everything I said about Daryl being a redneck, he was James Bond compared to this guy. This guy was the living embodiment of cousin-marrying, dynamite-fishing, moonshine-drinking rednecks.
He stood over me, glaring gleefully at me as I writhed in agony in the muddy stream in front of him, a grim mixture of excitement and pride filling his fat, red face. He crouched over me and studied my bruised and shredded face before craning his neck round and calling out to someone behind him.
"JACKSON. LOOKIE HERE AT WHAT I CAUGHT, I CAUGHT US A SURVIVOR." He yelled in a southern accent similar to Daryl's, only more distinctive, emphasising and mocking the word 'survivor' as he looked back down at me. He addressed me for the first time since he'd arrived with disdain and the same tone of mocking he'd used to call out to the other person.
"Wonder how long you're gonna live, lookin' at that nasty bite you got there." He sneered, pushing the metal barrel of his gun against my neck in an attempt to frighten me. I mustered my last ounce of strength and spat in his ugly face, before feebly attempting to roll away from the brute. He swore and stood up before resting his foot heavily on the wound, causing the sticks to push further into the open hole in my side. I screamed from the agony emanating from my side and began sobbing loudly, hoping for a walker to come and finish one of us off. He laughed cruelly down at me and then jerked his head side to side, trying to find the person he was calling.
"JACKSON, GET YOUR ASS DOWN 'ERE BOY! WHERE ARE YOU?" He screamed into the woods, whirling round as he did so. From up on the bank I'd fallen off, I heard a voice ring out across the forest.
"Same place you're goin', asshole." The familiar voice growled down to where I was. Had I not been in such an unbearable amount of pain I'm sure I would have grinned whole-heartedly, but all I could manage was a weak smile. The fat redneck noticed my smile and ground his foot further into my side, causing more pain to shoot through my entire body, almost causing my head to explode. I shrieked a final, bloodcurdling time and heard the whoosh of the air near me as an arrow pierced through it and slid cleanly into the stranger's head, the pointed tip of the arrow appearing out the other side of his skull as he stared at me with empty eyes and collapsed to the ground, thankfully not onto me or my side.
Panting more heavily and more raggedly than ever I stared blankly at the dead body next to me, registering the fact that a living, breathing human being was just killed next to me. Surely enough, Daryl slid down the bank and rushed over to check that I was alive, grabbing my face in one bloodstained hand and turning it left and right to check that I was still all there.
"D'you mind?" I asked weakly, smile starting to creep across my face. He snorted.
"Now the time to be jokin' around, you're nearly dead n'all." He mumbled, pushing leaves and branches out of the way so that he could look more closely at the blood coming slowly from my side. I laughed hoarsely again.
"You know what to say to all the girls." I sniggered again, this time more quietly. When I'd finished talking I screwed my face up and gasped again, as he'd just put a hand over the wound and I jerked around a little to try and ease the pain. His eyes darted around worriedly, wondering whether I was going to die or not. I wrapped an arm round his shoulders and tried to sit myself up. He looked shocked but didn't try and stop me.
"It's not deep, I just need to stop the bleeding." I breathed, gingerly trying to pull out the sticks. At least it was so dark I could barely see the sticks, so pulling them out was a lot easier than it would have been in the light. I grit my teeth and screamed into my closed mouth as I picked the jagged twigs out of the wound. Once I'd taken the worst of them out, Daryl ripped his shirt off and tied it round my waist and over the wound as a make-shift tourniquet. I turned to look at him, colour drained entirely from my face.
"Thanks, we should start moving now." I suggested. He raised an eyebrow at me and stood up, dragging me up with him until I was stood steadily on my feet. Even though my side was still searing with white hot pain, I knew that staying still wouldn't make it any easier. We began walking towards the bank, and started scaling the mound of earth so that we could rejoin the group.
About 30 minutes later, we were getting into a more familiar area of the forest; the area near the house. I glanced at Daryl.
"So did you find me or did I find you?" I asked curiously, my hand still applying steady pressure to the hole in my side. He frowned at me and then smiled slightly.
"I found you. You were 'bout'a become food for some fat ass redneck." he informed me as if I hadn't realised. I laughed loudly at him.
"No, no, I came out looking for you, and here we are, so I found you." I tried to reason with him, still giggling feebly. The laughter hurt my side, but it felt so good to laugh after everything that happened today. We carried on arguing like this for a little while until the house became barely visible up ahead in the distance. A wave of relief hit me and we began to pick up our pace as we made it towards the house.
The next part is the hardest part for me to describe to you, even now as I wash my hands clean of everything.
The air around the house began to fill with the gut-wrenchingly familiar low moans of the undead, and I automatically feared the worst. My heart pounded as images of the house being overrun filled my mind, and as my head filled, so did the forest around the house. I pulled my revolved from my waistband and cocked it, pointing it into the crowd as I did so. I saw Daryl do the same with his crossbow in the corner of my eye, so I knew I wasn't hallucinating. We sprinted forward as quickly as we could, and began to fire rapidly into the crowd of flesh eating maggots that surrounded our home.
The noise from my gun combined with the low moans of the undead must have awoken the rest of the survivors, as Rick, T-Dog and Glenn came rushing out the house and fired manically, bullets tearing viciously through the eyes and heads of the warped flesh that covered the walkers. My body was locked in a battle with itself; the pure effort of keeping the gun held up and my brain telling me none of the fighting was worth it anymore. We'd run far enough into the pack of walkers to be locked in hand to hand combat with them, fending off their cold, clammy grasp with smoking barrels and rapidly fired rounds.
We'd fought as hard as we could against the 20 or so walkers that were staggering around us, desperately trying to reach the house and get inside, but there was still about 5metres between us and the back doors where Rick and the other men were standing, and I could see the fear and the doubt in their eyes that we'd even make it back to them. I was distracted by my concern for Daryl, seeing as he wasn't wearing a shirt and was more exposed to the bite of a walker than any of us were. I saw the panic begin to set in on Rick's battle hardened face as he noticed the bloodstained shirt that I had wrapped around my waist, but I couldn't reassure him about my well being until we reached the safety of the doors.
As we drew closer to the door, Glenn darted forward and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, clearly more worried about my gaping wound than anything else and went to throw me inside, but I shook away from his grip as I slammed my body into the door, desperate to turn around and find Daryl in the chaos. At that moment, I watched helplessly as he became surrounded by at least 8 walkers who were all desperately trying to sink their rotting fangs into his skin and drag him down to the ground. I let out another blood curdling shriek and began firing blindly into the pack as I threw myself back in after him, hell-bent on pulling him out of the pile of dead flesh that now surrounded him. I sunk the barrel of my gun into the head of one walker and pressed it against the skull of another, blowing the shit out of both of them and tossing their foul remains aside before doing it again to another two.
When I'd cleared enough walkers out of the way, I bent down to where a semi conscious Daryl was kneeling and hauled him up, the adrenalin that pumped through me soothed my own wound as I did and made me numb to my own pain. I wrapped one arm around his chest and dragged him unceremoniously out through the rip in the hoard I'd made, Rick and T-Dog darting over to help me carry him through the back doors and into the house as he leaked blood from two large, glistening holes in his side and shoulder from where he'd been the latest casualty of a walker's ravenous hunger.