Chapter 30.
Grief.
Merle squirmed through the open window of the pickup, dragging himself through the flooded ditch, clawing his way up the bank.
A walker slammed into him immediately, its groaning, snapping sounds suddenly the only thing he could hear – its hand on his cheek, its bony fingers grasping the front of his shirt. Merle fought it off, aware of the water rising around him. It was midday but almost too dark to see. Sheets of rain hid the road, the trees, even the truck after he was a few feet away from it.
Walkers were sliding through the water like fish.
Merle waded back to the truck, spreading his arms to keep his balance as the water pushed past his shins and the ground turned to mud. A walker nearly took out his legs, another flipped over the upturned truck and got its hands on him. Merle grabbed its hair in his fist and slammed it against the side of the truck, frustrated.
"Daryl!" he called, voice swept away by the wind.
And then he saw him.
His brother was standing on the other side of the truck, drenched, his hand to his mouth like he was calling out, too. But before Merle could respond, could do anything, a walker dragged Daryl down. Several more piled on.
Merle tried to get to him, thinking of nothing else, but as he tried to move around the truck the flood cut his legs out from under him and swept him down into the woods with the walkers. Merle could barely get to his feet, barely keep the walkers off, especially when his head was in two places at once. He was driven, single-minded. He had to get back over there. He had to get to him.
He fought for several minutes, driving his knife into every walker he could see. In the woods, the visibility was better because the trees were catching a lot of the rain, but the undergrowth was treacherous. Merle walked against the current, tripping on felled limbs and getting tangled in thorns on the way. They ripped at his clothes like claws, tore open his arms.
When he made it back to the truck, the damn thing had flipped again. It was wholly on its side, walkers piled up, just waiting to spill over and overwhelm him.
He went for it anyway, climbing on top of the truck, looking down at a mass of undead squashed against the wheel well by the flood.
His heart hammered. He had never felt quite like this before – not since that bastard with a gun was chasing Daryl down when he was a kid, when he fired, and Daryl tripped. He never felt like he actually lost him, like he was really gone.
A hand on his arm brought him out of his shock. He turned, knife ready, and found Emily standing on the truck with him.
"We have to get out of here!" she said, her voice just high enough to be heard over the storm.
Merle had the sudden urge to throw her to the walkers. He couldn't manage to speak. What was he supposed to say? What was he supposed to do? He looked back down at the crowd.
Emily had his arm in a vice grip. She pulled him toward the forest, "Come on!"
Merle gave in.
He let her lead.
She took a path diagonally across the floodwaters, weaving around trees, bringing them out of the torrent. Once they were clear, they stopped to watch the water pulse over the forest floor. It was the damndest thing, almost knee-high now.
"Dam must've broken somewhere," Emily remarked.
Merle had nothing to say, but the fog of watching Daryl die began to clear. He set the pace as the storm began to ebb. It got hot, humid. A few miles into the woods, another knot of walkers gave them trouble, but Merle was mad enough to blow through six of them. He liked the feeling of bashing their heads into trees, the way their rotten skulls gave against the bark.
When they reached a little nowhere town off the highway, the rain had tapered into a drizzle. It was late evening. Merle kicked down the door of a locked house and downed a few walkers, leaving his knife in the last one.
He replayed the scene over and over – his brother going down under a mass of walkers – and he hoped it was quick.
A bottle of whiskey helped him forget.
Emily picked through the house while he lay on the couch. He became less and less aware of what she was doing, hugging the bottle under his arm. He woke to her tugging it out of his hand, saw her tip it up and finish it.
"I'm sorry about your brother," she said, at some point.
He said something shitty, probably.
And then he passed out.
XxXxX
He woke up early, alert, clear-headed – impressive, 'cause he drank most of a bottle of Jack on an empty stomach. It was lying on the floor nearby. Emily was curled up in a recliner, a blanket tucked around her shoulders, that engraved knife of hers clutched in one hand.
Merle lay there for the longest time, watching dawn arrive, thinking about what he had lost. Everything, all at once. He always thought Daryl would outlive him. He was younger, healthier, not quite as wild, or crazy. Daryl was clever – thought his way out of a lot of things when he was a kid. Merle drowned in thoughts of that doe-eyed boy trekking along behind him in the woods.
When it was too much, when the weight of his death sat like a boulder on his chest, Merle finally got up. His limbs ached from the crash, from sloshing around in that water fighting walkers, but he was not the type to rest up. He wandered the town instead, finding a stripped grocery store, a gas station with a full snack section, and then the liquor store. He sat on the counter, sipping cheap rum and eating big spoonfuls of peanut butter.
He must've been a sight, judging by the look on her face when Emily found him. He was still damp from the night before, covered in gore, a few bruises making lumps on his arms from the truck flipping. He had lost a shirt sleeve and a patch of his pants in the chaos. Thorns had scored his forearms, wrist to elbow, like ghostly claw marks.
She eyed the demolished walker beside him, surveyed the store, and then leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. She had bruises, too, all along her collarbone, and big purple welts on her arms. One eye was swollen, all puffy underneath, from where Cliff had slapped her.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
Merle said nothing, examining the label of his rum.
"Still going to find your family in Florida?"
It seemed pointless now, but there was nothing else for him. "Yeah."
"I want to come."
Merle snorted. "You seem plenty capable to me, way you was fightin' last night."
"More eyes and ears is safer," she said.
"Yeah, I 'spose." Merle stared at her, assessed her posture, picked out her motives. "You got someone special down south? I'm assuming you don't wanna join up because you enjoy my company."
She had a glint in her eyes. "I have two sisters. I think they're in that direction."
"Seems unlikely, all things considered." Merle drank the rest of his rum, hopping off the counter to find another bottle. "What I wanna know is, what do I get out of it? I'm better on my own." He peeked around an aisle at her, "I could think of a few things…"
She said nothing, coming up another aisle.
His threats were unenthusiastic, either from the rum or the circumstances. He watched her, curious, reluctantly admitting that she was right. Eyes and ears were priceless nowadays. When the dead stayed dead, all he worried about in the woods was bears and coyotes. In the same line, Emily was a little wild. She seemed likely to put a knife in his back any minute.
But since he just lost his brother, her wanting to find her sisters struck a chord.
"Fine," he said, as he picked up a bottle for the road. "Long as you can keep up."
XxXxX
"How much younger was he than you?"
Merle groaned, "You must be a sweet piece for Cliff to put up with you so long."
She had stopped rising to his comments, which was no fun. "If you don't want to talk about it, I understand. But it might help."
"Help with what?" Merle rounded on her, making her stop dead ten feet away. She wisely kept her distance on this long, tedious walk. "Crawl up out of my ass, blondie, 'fore I kick you to the curb."
She shrugged, carrying on silently.
Merle was quieter than usual, with no one worthwhile to talk to. Every time she opened her mouth, Emily stepped further toward his bad side. He liked to think he would follow through on his threat to drop her, but there was something about having her back there that made it easier to keep walking. Since this all started, he was only alone to hunt, to trap. Otherwise, he had been with his brother, or with Roy and Ed. He liked to talk, to stir shit, but losing his brother took it right out of him. He felt wrong, not like himself. Emily being there held him together.
And he needed that, now that everything was going wrong.
They went back to the accident and found the stuff all drowned out, crawling with walkers. They salvaged what they could carry and packed it away, walking miles down the highway and encountering few other vehicles to jumpstart. When they finally found one, they came up on a cluster of crashed cars not a mile down the road, stalling them again. The ones in front were too damaged to start up, and too wedged to move.
So they went on foot, sore and banged up, like a couple of vagrants.
Emily let out a short, quiet whistle, and Merle's neck prickled. He turned, finding her much closer than before, knife in hand. A bunch of wet guns were all they had to show for that truck full of supplies, not dry enough yet to try and fix. Emily had been fiddling with one, but there was no telling if it would fire.
Merle pulled out a knife.
"What?" he murmured, sensing her alarm.
"Coming out of the woods," she responded in a whisper, just as four figures walked up the embankment a hundred feet away.
All men, wearing camo. No visible guns.
Merle and Emily waited. Last thing he wanted was a tail. And there was something in the way they walked that spelled trouble. It was predatory. Merle recognized it because he walked that way, too.
"How's it going?" the lead man said.
It was a bunch of white guys wearing camouflage, heavy boots, and bulky backpacks. Campers, by the looks of it. Merle had considered going the wild route when this all started, roughing it, but he liked having a roof overhead and four walls a lot more. Warmer. Safer.
Merle responded in the friendliest tone he could manage, "Well as it can be, with all this shit going on."
Emily was tensed up beside him, arms down, but he could tell she was ready to unsheathe her knife. Quick as she was to put it to his throat when they met, he had a feeling she wouldn't hesitate to gut one of these guys.
"Whatcha got there?" the guy said, gesturing to the string of squirrels Merle had on his belt. Just three for now. "We ain't had much luck out here. Must've been hard getting those without a gun."
He was probing, seeing if they were easy prey.
Merle said, "No need to waste ammo when you're good with knives."
A veiled threat. A smile. A suggestion that he could have a gun. A bluff. It was like two packs of wolves circling, waiting.
"You wouldn't mind sharing, would you?" the guy said, giving a fake sort of smile. He was moving closer, almost unnoticeably slowly. Merle held his ground.
Merle glanced at Emily, chuckling, "Nah, gotta keep the little lady fed, you know what I mean? Seems you fellas can get your own."
"Bible says to help your fellow man."
"That so? Damn shame big J ain't here to straighten this out."
A moment of silence. The situation was escalating. Merle let his tone slip. The other men were spreading, trying to surround them. The lead guy had a friendly smile on his face – barely hidden threats in his words.
Emily acted before they could. She ripped the gun from her side and fired, shooting one of them in the forehead. He staggered and fell, and as his body hit the ground, the others scattered. Merle pulled his knife and hurled it at one, but missed his mark, nailing him in the shoulder instead. The guy twisted, yanked it out, and dropped it, tripping on his way into the woods.
"We better move, 'fore they regroup," Merle said. "With a stab like that, that guy ain't long for this world, anyway."
They continued down the road, redoubling their search for a working vehicle. They lucked out and found a truck pulled off to the side, old blood painting the doors and a couple of rotten corpses just down the road. Merle found the keys on one of the bodies and they were off.
"You went straight for the kill," Merle said. "Guess you really was ready to slit my throat, huh?"
She glanced at him, one eyebrow cocked.
It was a clear warning.
XxXxX
On a westbound highway that crossed from Georgia to Alabama, they encountered a cluster of cars worse than any he had seen. A month in, miles of travel, even a parade of broken cars on their way into Atlanta, and this stole the show.
He hopped up on top of the truck to see more of it. A couple of bridges doubled over one another, with a north-south highway passing underneath. Several eighteen wheelers were flipped on the higher bridge, cars clogged up behind them in a crash that must have killed several people on impact. One of the eighteen wheelers had gone halfway off the bridge. Its cargo must have been heavy to keep it up there. Beneath, the story repeated itself. A construction truck on top of a car it had squished. Motorcycles on their sides, streaks of blood leading up to them where the riders had been shredded by cement. And on the bottom, on the north-south highway, were piles of corpses. Merle could only reason that they had jumped off the higher bridges, trying to find safety below. Probably broke legs, arms, backs, and then got eaten alive at the bottom. Nowhere was safe.
Half-destroyed walkers were dragging themselves around by their arms, walking in endless circles around the bodies, rattling hubcaps on their way. Bodies were pinned under cars, under tires.
Emily came up beside him, looking over the scene first with horror, and then with a blank face. She crossed her arms tightly, holding herself.
"Might as well see what we can find, try to get to the other side of it," Merle said.
"Are there any other roads we could take?"
"Would add hours on, maybe a day, 'specially since we could run into the same shit again." Merle jumped off the truck, surveying the piles of cars in front of them. "People lost their goddamn minds. Look at this shit."
"It must have been hell out here."
"Where were you when it started?" he said.
"Oh, now you wanna talk?" she said, not even sparing a glance. She started weaving through the wreckage.
Merle snorted, going his own way.
"You're an enigma," Merle said, a little too loud, from across a couple of cars. "I mean, you let Cliff drag you around for weeks, and then you turn 'round and shoot that guy in the face."
Emily was silent, ignoring him.
"Seems like you must have liked Cliff, maybe enjoyed a little rough-" He had to stop midsentence to dodge a wrench she threw his way. Merle laughed. "Alright, alright. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you's comin' into your own. Done taking bullshit. What'd you do before, huh? Karate instructor? MMA fighter?"
She walked off, disappearing around some big trucks.
Merle found a bottle of Jack in the trunk of a little Civic, tipped it respectfully to the corpse rotting in the driver's seat, and downed half of it in one burning breath. He stopped looking through cars, done finding the same shit. His backpack was full, anyway. He had food and water, wasn't in the mood for blow. It was hot and miserable, bright as shit, and he was tipsy.
He ran into Emily near the end of the pileup. She was walking along the wall that kept cars from launching off the edge of the bridge. She had acquired a hat and sunglasses.
She held out a hand for the whiskey.
Merle gave it up, poking around in the nearby cars, hoping someone left their keys behind. "Start searchin' bodies."
"I was in a hospital," Emily said, dangling the keys to a Chevy on one finger. "I was with Carla, trying to get her to tell me what Cliff did to her. That's where I was."
She had asked him a question, too, and it seemed fair enough to answer it now.
How much younger was he than you?
"Daryl was born when I was ten."
Emily gave him a long, thoughtful look, saying nothing.
Merle reached for the keys and she pulled them away, a small smile on her lips.