I look back at Terminus, when the time's right. When we're at that place where you know you're far enough but you're still close enough, too, I do it. I look back. Some places – some things – you shouldn't look back at, but there are some times when you have to do that glance over your shoulder, or the full-on stare, even, at what you've left behind. Right now, Terminus – it's one of those times. One of those places, one of those things. I have to look back. I have to see it burning. And I do. Best seat in the house. Flames dart up to the sky, dart down, dart back up, chasing the smoke, which rolls over on itself as it climbs up and up and up, only to twist around and snarl at us, just like a monster. Like the ghost of a monster. Walkers crawl over Terminus. Maggots. They'll catch on fire and crumble, too, the whole place will crumble.
But some people will escape, I know.
We'll be far away from here by then. We'll be somewhere . . . somewhere else, somewhere safe – somewhere safe enough. Somewhere safe enough that we can just be together for a while, all of us, this group, long enough for us to remember what it feels like to be one whole, working, living unit.
No more looking back. I turn and go with my group.
. . . . .
"S'right here," my dad says when we've come to a place where the smell of smoke isn't so ungodly thick and the loudest noises are the sounds of the woods – dry leaves, creaking trees – and the heavy breathing, the muttering of our people. Dad, he's pointing to a spot in the ground, and it doesn't look too much different from any other spot, but I remember it. He brushes his hand under another spot right under a tree, tossing up dead brush and dirt until a small shovel-like thing shows itself. Dad throws that to Rick, who gets on his knees and begins to dig.
"What the hell're we still around here for?" growls someone from behind me. Abraham.
"Guns," Rick says. "Some supplies." Then, louder, in between breaths and the sound of the shovel doing its thing, "Go along the fences . . ."
Chh, Chh, goes the shovel.
"Use the rifles . . ."
Chh . . . Chh . . . Chh.
"Take out the rest of them."
Chh. Chh.
"What?" Bob comes up next to Carl, next to me. Rick stops and looks over his shoulder at him.
"They don't get to live." Then back to the dirt.
My fingers flutter, drying my clammy hands. My dad's leaning on that tree he got our shovel thing from, watching Rick and biting something in his mouth, like he does sometimes when he's thinking.
"Rick, we got out," Glenn says after a little slice of just the digging and the breathing and the leaves. "It's over."
The bag of guns, the guns – and other stuff – that we picked off of the corpses of Joe's group, appears from the dirt, a shock of blue. Rick pulls out a revolver, checks it for bullets. "It's not over till they're all dead," he says in the meantime.
"The hell it isn't!" The army girl. "That place is on fire!" She throws an arm up, in the direction of the hellhole. "Full of walkers!"
Rick doesn't seem bothered. Come to think of it, Rick doesn't even seem . . . angry, not really. Not in the rabid animal, rip-out-your-throat-with-his-teeth kind of way, at least. Whatever he's feeling – whatever the people who took them made him feel – he's just being matter-of-fact now. They don't get to live. Like he's talking about slaughtering pigs for food no matter how attached Carl has gotten to them.
"We're not dickin' around with this crap." Abraham again, harsh, understandably. He doesn't know Rick, doesn't get who he is, as a person and to us. "We just made it out."
Rick stands.
"The fences are down," says Maggie, gentler, with the respect she knows Rick deserves, even if he is being irrational. "They'll run or die."
Irrational. Do I think Rick's being irrational? I really don't know, I don't – I know I want to get away from here. But I don't know what those people did to Rick, to my dad, or to Glenn or Bob or anyone else. What they planned to do to us. But Bob wants to go. Glenn wants to go. Does my dad? He's still just thinking, fingers tapping on the tree, with a look at Rick, a look to the ground, a look back at Terminus, a look at the group, and finally, a look straight at me. I lift my eyebrows a tiny bit. He grinds his jaw and gives a look to Rick again. Rick's giving one back. All Rick needs is a nod from Dad, I know, and then it'll be us going around and picking those people off one by one, BANG! BANG!, like snipers, for better or worse. Just a nod from Dad. Or a shake of his head. That's what it comes down to.
But then a figure appears behind Dad and Rick, stepping out from somewhere so it's positioned just in the middle of them, twenty feet back. I shift my weight, adjust the bow that isn't there, and right as I open my mouth to warn someone, I recognize that it's a who, not a what, not just a figure. Not a walker. Not a stranger. I go rigid.
Dad, I don't know if he sees me or if he hears or just senses something, the way I think he does sometimes, but he twists to look over his outstretched arm and goes as rigid as me, I swear.
It's Carol. She's dirty, she looks exhausted, but she's very much her. Alive and well enough, looks like. She's carrying some stuff, some weapons, one of which is a crossbow and its bolts, another of which is a bow carrying a tied-on quiver and a little bundle of arrows. The bow, my bow, how wonderful, but it's a sideshow. Carol's the main event. How she's here, why she's here, is so far beyond me that my brain won't even try to grab the strands and tie them together, or maybe it just doesn't want to, because my heart is in control right now, filling and filling and not slowing down, and it swells so much that it reaches my throat, gives me a lump there that keeps me from saying her name. Carol.
Then my dad does something that I've never seen him do with anyone but me. I hear his breath rush out all ragged, and he runs to her, Carol, fast. He throws his arms around her and she does the same with him, and they push their faces into each other's shoulders and I think hold on as tight as they can. It makes the lump in my throat get even bigger and I raise my hand to my mouth to push it back. That's when I discover that there's a smile there, a crazy, every-tooth smile. Tears want to come but I'm smiling, too. That's what happens when you feel too much of a good thing, it almost kills you, and you don't care. Carl takes my shoulder, the one farthest away from him, so his arm is almost around me but his palm has a good, steady hold. Maybe he's afraid I'll fall over or maybe he's afraid he'll fall over. She belongs to him, too. Maybe he's afraid of both.
Dad lifts Carol off the ground some, that's how happy he is. Happy.
Happy, not horrified, no, not horrified to see Carol –
My smile snaps back into my mouth. My eyes shut themselves, like someone pretended to throw something at me. My head twists to the side, and down, my nose and eyes all crinkle, by themselves. It's involuntary, every piece of it, this sudden physical, mental withdraw from good things.
No, please. Not now. Let me have this. Let me enjoy this.
I open my eyes and force my head straight. I take a deep breath. I watch Dad and Carol. I drift up to them. Slowly, the bad stuff drains out. The good stuff comes back in, like a warm mist, floating through me and growing until it's almost too much to hold. I like it. It's good. Yes, yes. Let me enjoy this. I'm enjoying this.
Dad and Carol. He pulls away from her, and her face and eyes are red but she's also smiling. But Dad goes to her again, he's not done. He presses his head back into her shoulder. It's just for a second this time. Then he stands straight and just looks at her some more.
Yes, he's happy. I'm happy for him.
Rick's come up to them, and I remember. I remember what Rick told me in that house, when things were bad between us and about to get worse. He told me he'd made Carol leave. That she'd – that she'd killed Karen and David –
He can't send her away again. He can't.
I hear him whisper something. I think it's Did you do that? Terminus. He must mean Terminus. I don't know what part exactly, but something. The fire, the gunshots. It couldn't all have been my dad and the others, could it?
Carol pulls her lips in tight. Her eyes are close to overflowing. She gives a tiny couple of nods, a sort of gasp with a sort of smile, and then, then Rick hugs her just as tight as my dad did. Rick.
And a tear comes from me then, hot, and a million different muscles relax, because everything's alright. No matter what, everything's alright.
Carol pulls away from Rick soon, though. She gives him a sudden wide-eyed look, and says, breathlessly, "You have to come with me."
. . . . .
She takes us down a dirt road to a cabin.
It's a rundown cabin. It almost stops me in my tracks, because from out here it's very, very much like my dad's old house, this cabin. Same kind of untrustworthy porch that sometimes snaps under your foot and makes you freeze but never gives way. A woodpile with its short logs trying to run from the top. Antlers hung around, trophies from great hunts. Dad and Merle never had anything stuffed. They just kept the things from the kill that wouldn't rot. I liked it better that way. Antlers don't stare at you.
I keep moving, because that's all in the past and this is a now cabin with now things inside.
We climb a hill up to the cabin. Right when we get to the top, a man comes out, a big black man, and he's holding a baby.
Carl's gone from my side like a shot.
Rick, Sasha, they're gone too. Everything dropped, left behind them, they're moving forward now. The rest of us keep walking, because we know this isn't our moment. We can enjoy it, and even have smaller moments of our own, but this first one, the best one, isn't ours.
I want it to be. I want to chase Carl. But I don't. I rein myself in like a horse and watch Rick scoop Judith from Tyreese and cradle her to him like she's the most precious thing in the world, which she might be. I watch Sasha take hold of her brother, watch him hold her back, listen to her either laugh or sob and see his eyes squeeze shut. I stop, close enough but not too close. I just observe. Once again – best seat in the house. Rick and Carl bundle up with Judith, beautiful baby Judith. Rick kisses her head. Inhales her. Carl has his back to me, but I can hear him – or imagine I can – whispering, almost choking, air shoved from his lungs to make room for the happiness. It's the voice he used with me the other night, when we first found each other again.
I think of him at the prison, after we found the bloody carrier, when he wouldn't stop shooting at a walker that was already down. When I had to get him and his father out of there. When he screamed at his dad while he was almost-dying on a couch, how he cried to me. That's all gone now. Way back there, with Terminus, with the prison and the farm, with all the places left burning in our wake. Here, now, Judith is alive. With her dad and her brother who love her, love her so much.
Their little family, their blood family, is back together again. A dad and two kids. It's more than most of us have. And it's wonderful, and today is one of the best days since Day One of the turn. I feel that in my bones.
But there's something in me, something apart from those good-feeling bones, that's very out of place. Like Carol showing up outside of Terminus, only – different. It's the same kind of flip-flop This doesn't belong There feeling, but This isn't a good thing this time around. The This inside of me is an ache. A little one, drowning underneath the joy – and I swear I'm feeling joy, and a hell of a lot of it – but still. It's there. That little ache. Little but deep. Like a nasty splinter embedded in the pit of my stomach.
Why. Why, why.
Something, a magnet, pulls my eyes to Dad. LC isn't far beyond him. Not standing with him. I'm not standing with him, either, not out of any sense of something bad, but just because this is how we fell, me and him, me over here and him over there. We're in a crooked line, the three of us. A broken family. Just like the good old days.
The good old days. That makes me think of something, someone, and I twist to search for him. I look past the smiling faces, the content faces, past Glenn holding Maggie's hand. And I find him. He's behind everyone else. One hand is in his jacket pocket, the other is holding his bloody board-club, and his blonde hair is plastered to his forehead, with strands of it stretching down to hide parts of his eyes. But I can see them well enough. I can see his whole face well enough.
The splinter plunges deeper into me, maybe it even grows, maybe it's meant to become a tree.
Because his face? Owen's face? It's my ache. A picture of it. A portrait. Full color, every detail. On display, I know, for a limited time only. But it's there. And I can't take my eyes off of it. Good art speaks to you, someone told me once, but great art speaks for you.
I'm still staring at him, still feeling my splinter – God, it's twisting, it's bad – when a hand takes my arm and pulls. Pulls me. Pulls out the splinter, pop. Because the hand is Carl's, and Carl is telling me Come here. And he pulls, pulls, pulls me over to Rick and Judith. I stand with them, three turns to four. I tell Judith how beautiful she is, and Carl puts his arm around me. I like that. I like this. Them. Being with them. They're a good family, a blood-bound unit inside of our bigger one, one of the bricks making up the house. I want to stay here, under Carl's arm and touching Judith with Rick standing guard over us all, him the adult and us the kids, and I will. For as long as they'll have me, I will.