A.N.: Hi, everyone. I'm back. I have a lot of catching up to do, I know. Hopefully there are still some of you out there who haven't given up on this story. If so, thank you, and please enjoy this extra-long new chapter.
. . . . .
Abraham's muffled voice breaks into the moment like a rock through a window. "Shit!"And then it actually sounds like a rock hits a window. The RV jolts the way vehicles do when they run over something, throwing Dad and me around even as we try to stand, and beneath my feet and all around me, really, I feel that uncomfortable strain of tires grinding their way through something they shouldn't have to. Dad's arm slips off my shoulders and he bursts into the next room, and I follow him, falling into the doorframe on my way, because we hit something else – we hit multiple something elses, and my stomach is heavy with dread even before I stumble into the front room and, through the spaces between the standing, stirring people in my group, watch the world beyond the windshield. It's a walker-filled world. More than usual, I mean – we've run into a herd. The windshield wipers are scraping at dark, chunky streaks of gore as Abraham forces the RV to a stop so sudden I fly into a trembling, sweat-soaked Eugene. Ahead of us, through the dozens of walkers haunting the road, I can see the taillights of the car carrying Rick and the others. The lights jerk around, swing this way and that, but the scariest thing is that they're getting dimmer, smaller, moving further onto the road, deep in the thick of walkers.
Dad nearly knocks over Rosita on his way to the front seats. "Back it up!"
"Which way?" Abraham barks, even as the engine roars below us and I lose my footing again. "They're swarmin'! It's like a damn ambush!"
Someone grabs my arm. Owen. He pulls me toward him, then pushes me around him, until I sort of fall into one of the seats at the dining table. He makes his way closer to the front as a shape I recognize as Carl's appears beside me, standing on the outside of my chair. I prop myself up on my knee as Maggie shouts, "We can't get separated from them!"
"We don't got a choice!" My dad shouts back, and the RV drives backwards and around, sending me into the wall and Carl into the seat beside me. I grasp onto his sleeve as we ram into walkers, thud THUNK thud thud, as our tires squeal against the road and against flesh, and we're all tossed around in here like whatever it is they put in baby rattles.
Abraham manages to maneuver the RV so that he can drive forward again, and he does, and we charge through a few more walkers and send them flying above us or rolling beneath the tires, but in just a few moments we're speeding down the road like nothing happened, except now we're going in the opposite direction of where we want to be and we've lost the car carrying three of our best people and the one person who maybe could get us access to a safe, strong place.
"What do we do now?" Tara asks, panting.
"We gotta find a different way," Dad says, gripping the headrest of the passenger seat. "Gotta get around that mess and reconnect with the others."
"If they got through," I hear Sasha say.
"They got through." Maggie.
"You saw them?"
"No. But they got through. Daryl's right, we gotta figure somethin' out. A new route. Who has the map?" But I barely hear her last words, because right then Noah, sitting right across from me and Carl, jams his finger against the window pane.
"Look!"
I do, I guess we all do. No one has to ask him what he means. Above the blur of the trees lining the road, a light streaks through the sky. It almost looks like a falling star, but unbelievably bright. And not falling. Rising.
"It's a signal!" says Rosita. "A flare!"
"From the others?" asks Tara. "Isn't that too far away to be them?"
"Maybe not," Dad says. "Not if they took a turn they weren't supposed to, to get outta that herd."
"It has to be them," Maggie says. "Anyone else happening to have a flare gun, happening to send up a signal right then? That's too much of a coincidence."
"Unless it's the other person." Carol. "The person Aaron came with. He'd have a flare gun, too. He'd be close by."
"If it's him, he won't wanna hurt us," Leah says. She's just a couple of feet from my Dad, tucked in next to a cabinet and masked by darkness. Dad looks sideways at her. "He might just need help, too," she continues. "And it'd just be one guy. If Aaron's telling the truth, which I think he is."
"Don't see a better option," Abraham says. "There was a turn up here somewhere, should take us that way. Someone find a map and make sure we're not gettin' any deeper up shit creek."
. . . . .
Trying to connect something you saw in the sky to something on the ground is tricky. I don't know if it's the same thing, but as we roll along curves and twists through the dark, chasing a spot in the sky, I'm reminded of this time when I was younger and at Dad's and I decided I'd run towards the full moon until it was right above me and I could see what it looked like from that angle. I ran for a long time, long enough that Dad chewed me out when I eventually returned to his place, having gotten nowhere close to being right below the moon.
I get now why that didn't work, of course, how the moon's set really far and just so from the Earth, but the flare is just another human thing. It's not impossible to chase it down. Except that the thing about flares is they blaze through the dark to catch your attention and then die before you even know what to do about it. So you're not just chasing after a light in the sky, a tiny moon imposter, no – you're chasing after the spot where that light was, for just a few moments. And that, I think, is why Dad, Abraham, Rosita, and Sasha mutter so much and sometimes fiercely to one another for a good while, jabbing their fingers at the window or sometimes at the wrinkled, stained map they keep tugging away from each other, even before I realize we're entering a town.
It's a little town, barely more than a neighborhood, and the street I see slipping by through the window is empty besides the stray walker here and there, resting against the brick wall of a store like a tired homeless person or just rambling around like someone searching for a good late-night restaurant. Restaurants. I would love to go out and eat again, to sit down in a booth and flip through a menu of dozens of meals I could have in minutes just by asking, talking about nothing – the good kind of nothing – with my mother or maybe my grandparents, surrounded by strangers I didn't have to be afraid of, because they were just people like us, just trying to get a meal, like us . . .
I lift my eyebrows and lower them slowly, pressing my palm to my forehead. There's a quiet, easy buzzing in my skull, I think it's making my whole head lighter. If I had to guess, I would say Dad should have stuck with giving me one pain pill instead of deciding on two, but it's too late and I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure I'm happy about the mistake. This isn't a bad feeling.
"Here?" Abraham is saying, though I don't look, my eyes are closed.
"No," Dad answers. "Another street down."
"If you say so. Chances are you'll be backtrackin' here, though. Damn guessin' game . . ."
"We're close. We'll find 'em."
"We'll find someone." Sasha.
No one answers her. We roll, we roll, I roll my head around on my neck and it circles like smoke up from a cigarette, or a campfire, or a burning home, and I open my eyes just as the RV stops, tucked into the side of a street.
"Alright," Dad says, either to nobody in particular or to the entire RV, or maybe to Abraham, I'm a little ways away from him and it's dark, so I can't quite tell. "Flare came from somewhere 'round here. Findin' whoever sent it up shouldn't take long."
If they're alive. Flares are for emergencies. Of course, being separated from us was enough of an emergency to set one off, I suppose. Probably, if it was our people, everyone's fine. We're great at being fine. Everybody makes it . . . 'Til they don't. Someone said that once. Bob. I liked him. I need to write about him. But our people are fine, yes, because after everything they've been through? One walker herd, that's nothing. "Mm-hmm," I hum.
"What?" Carl whispers.
"Nothing."
Dad doesn't want two groups outside. He doesn't want many people outside at all. He takes Maggie, Rosita, Carol, and Leah. Owen says he should go, too. Dad says no. Owen mutters something and walks down the length of the RV, rubbing both hands over his face and then through his hair, bloodshot eyes glowing in the dark. Leah watches him, then looks back to Dad and I think meets his eyes, or maybe I'm just paranoid, before Dad takes his crossbow into his hands and leads her and the other three out into another strange place on another strange night. I miss familiarity. Familiarity from a place, at least. I think about my cell back at the prison, my undecorated, impersonal cell, and feel a surge of homesickness in spite of the bare walls in my memory. It was mine. It was a reflection of the coldness inside of me that I was trying to keep from eating me up, that's true, but it was mine. And the last time I was in it, I still had Bob. Hershel. Beth.
Would Beth feel sorry for herself?
I crack my neck and tap my fingers on the table, shaking my head a few times, trying to toss off this too-light feeling, this buzz, that's somehow also heavy. And nice. But not good, nope, this is how addictions start, and that's how a pretty young mother ends up locking herself in her office when it's Saturday night and she thinks her daughter's asleep.
Abraham is still in the driver's seat, his head pointed forward, and I can't see his hand so I'm pretty sure it's resting on his gun. Dad left him to be the adult guarding the children, essentially. I get that. Except, it's not really true. Even if "children" is metaphorical –
– Like in poems, God, I miss the prison's library –
– even if "children" is metaphorical, Owen's not a child, he's more man than boy. Carl, too. Less so, but yes, that's true. He hasn't had to live quite like Owen, Carl still had – has – grownups to make sure he's not entirely, entirely living like a grown-up has to, but Owen, he had to be whatever Joe wanted him to be from I guess the get-go, and for so long. He's drifted back to the front of the RV, watching the ghost-town street through the windshield, forming and loosening fists so fast his fingers blur. Dad should have let him go. Sasha – Sasha hasn't been at her best. But I think she's still more useful in a fight than out of it. And then there's Tara, I don't know her that well, but Glenn and Maggie trust her, so I guess I do, and I've seen her handle herself a few times. Sure, fine, Gabriel, Eugene – who knows, really, what they can do? Eugene sits contemplating his hands in a lonely chair beside the door to the back room, like he's in time-out, and I don't see Gabriel so I can only guess he either retreated into the bathroom or the back room to be alone with himself or his God or whoever. They're both liars, they're both cowards – close to children, I guess, the closest we have besides Judith.
Can they change? Can anyone?
And Noah? Is he a child, in the ways that matter? He's still where he was before, sitting stiffly across the table from Carl and me. He hasn't said a word since he pointed out the flare. And his eyes are on my hand. My left hand. It's resting on top of the table, mostly covered by my right hand, but you can still see the wrappings and the gaping hole where two more fingers should be. I flex the hand, and there's a sting, but it's more like a request from my body that I please don't do that anymore than actual, STOPDOINGTHAT pain.
"My dad gave me pain pills," I tell Noah. "They're helping. It really doesn't hurt much at all."
Noah's eyes sort of hesitate before they lift to meet mine, I think because he didn't realize I was talking to him. But when he sees that I was, he shifts uneasily and looks right back away. "Good."
"Losing a couple of fingers really isn't that big of a deal, anyway. My uncle lost his whole hand. He had to saw it off himself. And that was because Rick handcuffed him to a – a pipe?" I turn to Carl. "Was it a pipe?"
He stares at me. "Yeah, Syd, it was a pipe."
I turn back to Noah, who's watching me with his head tilted down, eyebrows kind of close together. "A pipe. On a roof. I don't blame him for it, though. Neither does my dad. Rick was doing what he thought he had to. You know? So I don't blame him."
Noah's gaze falls to my fingers again, then to his lap. "Rick's a good guy."
"Sydney, do you wanna go lie down again?" Carl asks, and right then Judith starts to cry. She's in Tara's lap, and she was asleep, but now she begins to wail, and Tara bounces her, gives her a goofy, pleading grin, but Judith's really pissed off about something all of a sudden. Carl stands to go get her, and I catch Owen say something to Abraham underneath the noise. I think Abraham shakes his head. Owen half-grins, but drops it pretty fast, and his eyes cut to me. I tilt my head, and he whips his towards the door, jaw working. Of course this is hard for him. All that time out in the world with Joe, I doubt he was ever made to stay behind anywhere, he would have been mocked to hell if he had. The other men, those bastards, they treated him like just another one of them, not like a kid, and that was horrible in so many ways, but he grew up, he had to, and now . . . Now he keeps getting told to stay behind. It's not who he is. Not anymore. I hurt for him for the second time tonight, because damn, damn, this world has carved him up . . .
Abraham's voice fills the RV, even though he's not really shouting. "They're back . . . two of 'em."
"What?" I say, right as Sasha asks which two.
"Rosita and Daryl," he answers, and stands as they RV door swings open and Dad climbs up. He scans the room, checks I'm here, then says, "Found Aaron's friend." He steps out of the way so Rosita, gleaming with sweat, can come in, then he shuts the door and continues. "Ankle's hurt. Maggie and Carol are patchin' him up in this garage he got himself to. Just in an alleyway, right around the corner. Think we should all head there."
"What about my dad?" Carl says. "The others?"
"If we could see the flare, so could they," Dad says. "They got through that herd, they weren't just gonna keep drivin'. They'll be tryin' to find us, just like we're tryin' to find them, and they'll have headed toward the flare before anything else. They knew Aaron's buddy had it." Dad wipes his brow. "We get there, we rest up. We wait. They'll find us."
If they're still alive, a bad voice whispers in my brain.
Abraham drives a little ways more, to get us closer to the garage and to find a less out-in-the-open place to park. One walker rambles straight to us as we roll steadily along, its glassy eyes empty of everything, from fear to desire, and the RV almost seems to eat it up. I feel it thud twice beneath the tires.
Abraham finds a place he likes better and we trickle onto the street, following Rosita and Dad. I start to take my bow from my shoulder but remember I'm not that great with it now and check that my revolver's in my waistband, though I don't pull it out. We jog down the street just, what, a couple of blocks? I focus on keeping pace with my dad. My head seems to be floating more than sitting on top of my neck, and I know that's not a good way to be when I'm out in the street with walkers and who knows what else all around, but just because I know it doesn't mean I can make myself care about it or even worry too much about it . . . It's a nice, nice feeling, this lightness, this . . .
This numbness? This film?
Mmm.
We slip down an alleyway as much as a group this size can slip anywhere. A walker slumped against a wall tries to snag me once. Dad shoots it and pulls me away, like he's done a hundred, a hundred times before. It's almost comforting.
Light. Little boxes of light, collected to make one big box – or, a square, I suppose. It's a flat shape, a flat shape made of light, and it's hanging over a door deep down in this alleyway –
– so deep, how will Rick and the others find us? –
– shining like a dim hope, saying maybe it'll be okay, maybe. Dad bounds over a couple of concrete steps to the door and knocks on it in a special way, a pattern. It opens almost immediately and there's LC, lips curling into a thin smile when she sees him and then curling a little more when she sees me. Candlelight dances behind her, interrupted by a couple of shadows.
Dad nudges me in before him, so I wind up being the first new person in the room. The couple of shadows are from Maggie and someone I don't know. The someone, he's on the floor but propped up by striped cushions, his leg lifted on a small one, so Maggie can wrap it easily. "Hi," he says. I ease into the room, checking Maggie's eyes – she gives the same kind of thin smile I got from LC, a smile that says Yeah, some of our people are missing and maybe dead, but it'll probably be okay, okay? – before looking around. There's a line of candles lit on a narrow table close to Maggie and the man, and I think Carol was standing there, because that's where she's coming from as she walks to me. She rests a hand on my shoulder before going to Dad. One of the walls in here is lined with hollow boxes, cubbies, of sorts, although I haven't seen them since I was in preschool and I didn't know adults used them. "What was this place?" I ask . . . someone. It's Carl who answers, moving up beside me with Judith in his arms.
"Supply room."
"How do you know?"
"There was a sign above the door."
". . . Oh. Hi, Judith . . ."
That's how I end up pacing the floor of a candlelit supply room with a drowsy baby in my arms, singing softly for her to please come to Boston for the springtime and Denver for the snowfall and so on and so on. The man – Maggie introduced him as Eric – is on the other side of the room. Maggie's still sitting beside him, even though his ankle's fixed up as best it can be. Carl's leaning against an oversized desk close by me, his eyes switching constantly between me and his sister, Eric, and the door we came in by, now closed again with my dad on the other side, keeping watch for anything dangerous but even more importantly keeping watch for our people, Rick and Michonne and Glenn. And Aaron, but he's not our people. But Eric keeps glancing anxiously at the door. Though I guess if I were him, in a room with a bunch of people I didn't know much about other than that they were dangerous, I would be anxious, too.
But he does know we're dangerous, and why? Because he was spying on us. Anger streaks through me but fades just as fast, fades right into the rest of my buzzing mind, and I keep humming to Judith and pacing and I turn on my heel and I'm facing Carl again, and his eyes are back on the door, so I stop humming and say, still walking, "They've gotten out of worse spots than this, Carl. Way worse."
His eyes meet mine and then drop to his shoes. "Yeah. I'm gonna . . . I'm gonna find a box or something for Judith to sleep in." He crosses the room, passing the loose knot of our people, sitting mostly together, so he can search through the pile of furniture that's formed in one corner of the room. And, in the meantime, he won't have to think about hard things.
And not have to listen to me?
Judith's eyes are closed, I think she's out. I rest my head on hers and quit pacing, just start swaying back and forth. Owen is kneeling beside Tara, who's talking to him over an open can of beans. He's nodding, he's listening, I even saw him laugh a little a minute ago, right along with her. But he's not actually sitting, no, he's kneeling there, one hand propped on his knee, ready to get up and leave at a moment's notice. That's just him, and it makes my mood tip down, just slightly, like when a leaf is balanced on a wet road, filling with water, but it gets one raindrop too many and it spills what it has . . .
But I don't spill. I hum to the sleeping baby and let my gaze drift, drift, until it settles on Noah, one of the four people actually sitting all alone – the other three being Eugene, Gabriel, and Sasha – with his back to the wall and his knees to his chest and a game of solitaire in front of him. A minute passes. I watch him the whole time. He doesn't move a single card. He just stares at them.
Carl comes back. He has a crate. "Here." He sets the crate on the ground and I come to my knees beside it while he finds a blanket in one of our packs. I kiss Judith's head, so unbelievably soft, while Carl folds and flattens the blanket until it fits in the crate. I lay her down. Her thumb finds its way to her mouth almost immediately, and Carl and I stay kneeling there for a moment, him on one side of her and me on the other, and it's a good moment.
Then he says, "What we're feeling right now, waiting for them? I know you've felt it before. But I just want . . . I need to know you understand that this is what you make me feel when you do things like . . . run off into the woods after your dad. Or to Atlanta. Without me, without me knowing . . . I go through this. Every time. And it's not fair of you to do that to me."
I watch Judith's eyes twitch. I don't know what babies are supposed to dream about, but I bet Judith has good dreams, and I'm glad about that. Though I envy her. "I think . . . I might be stoned. On pain pills. Well, I'm probably not all the way stoned. I don't even know if stoned is the right word. But my point is, I'm not in any condition to talk to you about this right now." I reach out and touch his face. "But you know I love you. And you know that I'm always, always going to run somewhere, sooner or later. Always. You have to understand that." I stand. "I need to go talk to Noah." I leave Carl behind with the baby.
I cast a shadow across Noah and his cards, across the entire wall, as if there's a giant version of me that only shadows notice. "My Papaw told me once that solitaire is the loneliest game ever invented. Only for people who have no friends or who don't like the friends they have."
"Uh . . ." Noah gazes over his cards, crossing one arm over his chest. He looks a little frightened when I sit down across from him.
"You a poker player?"
His mouth moves but I think he changes his mind about what he's going to say. He pauses, then says, "My dad and I used to play Texas Hold 'Em."
"Great. You'll have to deal." I wave my bad hand, and of course that sends a flush of color over his face. He hurries to collect the cards, clearing his throat.
We bet using peanuts, because Noah had a bag of them tucked away, the honey-roasted kind. We divide them more or less evenly, using the flat side of his backpack as a surface to keep them on. Noah starts to deal. He's clumsy at it. There's no one in the world I ever played more poker with than my uncle. I saw him deal a million times. His hands would flash the cards this way and that, shuffle them into a blur. He'd let me deal some, he taught me how to make a bridge with the cards and shuffle them that way, and I got pretty good at it, but by the time I was ten – that's how old I was the last time we played poker, at the camp in Atlanta – I still thought he was amazing. With cards.
Noah's holding his hand, the deck at his side, still. I pick a peanut from my pile and drop it onto a rag he's spread across the hard floor. He stares at it.
"Well, ante up," I say.
"Oh." He drops his own peanut next to mine.
I pick up my own with ease, because in Texas Hold 'Em you only get dealt two cards. It's a good game for someone who's used to having ten fingers but suddenly only has eight. I have a five-of-spades and a three-of-hearts. Not fantastic odds, but who knows? Nana used to say that a lot – Who knows?
"I don't blame you," I say without looking up from my cards, as if glancing at them just doesn't cut it.
I hear him inhale. I'm not sure I expect him to reply, but he does, eventually, even as I'm trying to decide if I should say something else. "I pushed that walker onto you," he says quietly. "I didn't see who it was, coming up to me. I didn't see it was a person, a living person. I didn't see it was a kid. Didn't see it was you. But I saw something coming up to me, and I was tangled up with that walker, and I just . . . threw it. And you lost your fingers because of that. And I'm sorry."
I slide my thumb over the edge of a card. Bend it at the corner, then let it go. "For all you knew, we could have been coming to kill you. You were alone. You were scared. I might've pushed the walker at anybody who came through the door." I'm not sure that's true, but I know I can't say I wouldn't. You get in situations like that, and you surprise yourself, in good ways and bad. "And the walker didn't get my fingers because you pushed it on me. It got my fingers because I thought it was dead when it wasn't and I got too close." I reach up to the rose on my neck, let it dangle over my little finger and ring finger, twist them so they get a little wrapped up in it. "My mistake was worse than yours."
"I really don't think so."
"You don't have to. But you have to live with it." I meet his eyes. "I think that's what Beth would tell you."
A quick shot of pain hits him, he ducks his head to hide it, but I see. I see the extra shine in his eyes that mean tears. I know that shine. "She should have just let Dawn have me," he says. "Everything would have been okay for you guys if she had just let that go."
I think back to what my dad told me one night at the prison, after he found me dripping blood from two cuts you can still see on my arm because I was certain that I was bad, certain that I was to blame for my uncle's death – the way he died, his almost-definite suicide. Dad bandaged me up, stayed on his knees beside me while the world was still too heavy for either of us to stand. Your uncle died 'cause he wanted to, he told me. 'Cause he wanted to give us a chance. That was his choice.
Good a point as any. He was right, after all.
"That was her choice," I murmur to Noah. "She knew what she doing. She knew it might . . . she knew she might be sacrificing herself. But she got you out. She made sure Dawn . . . wouldn't hurt anyone else . . . She knew what she was doing. She would want you to move on. To live. We might be getting a chance to do that now. If this place is for real. This could be the kind of place she'd believe in."
A tear escapes Noah's eye. He wipes it off and sniffs, nodding.
"I'm sorry," I say. "You probably figured we'd just play poker. I think I meant to, but, honestly, those pills are really gettin' to me."
He kind of laughs at that, and then sort of hangs onto the smile, and I think he's about to say something else, but he's interrupted by a thwap thwap thwap! from across the room. That'd be Dad. I get to my feet and look to Carl, who's already bolting towards the door. He's the first one out. I hear him call out, "Dad!" in a happy, child-like voice I don't hear him use enough, and I close my eyes and breathe.