6:47 am
It was happening again. It was happening again. Amelia had just escaped this nightmare, only for it to catch up to her the next day.
How long did it take you to lose her again? Twelve hours?
Amelia gritted her teeth, fighting the urge to scream with walkers just outside the door.
Nick muttered behind her, "Fuck…" He looked from the door, watching it rattle as walkers tried to push their way in, to the high windows near the ceiling. Walkers were lumbering out of the woods as far as they could see, wandering around the tree line, surrounding the shed. "There…there are so many."
The tears had stopped, but Amelia remained on her knees, braced against the overturned shelf. She stood and went to a window, stepping up on a crate to see. He was right.
Nick cursed again, but this time Amelia didn't hear any panic in his voice. "I've never seen this many."
She had. For a moment, she was back in Savannah. Seeing them everywhere she looked, losing her grip on Clementine's hand, minutes away from losing consciousness to the fever and dropping dead in a sea of corpses…
She was interrupted by Nick, who spoke calmly and quietly.
"We're never getting out of here." He sat down on a stack of crates and put his head in his hands. He let out a long, exhausted sigh. Quietly, to the floor, he said, "I guess that's how it goes, then."
Amelia ignored him. Clementine was a smart girl. And she was with Pete. The chances that they made it back to the cabin alive had to be good.
She remembered that Clementine was unarmed, Pete was wounded, and he had run out of ammunition.
No. Amelia thought. She'd seen Clementine do plenty of damage with much less than an empty gun. They're fine.
Or, Clementine would be fine. Pete only had about a day left.
He could turn near Clementine.
Doesn't matter. They're probably both dead already.
She turned to Nick. "How many bullets do you have left?"
"They're called cartridges." Nick said, then shook his head. "Not that it matters anymore."
"How many?" Amelia could hear her patience thinning.
Nick reached into his pockets, counting quietly. "Two, three…five here. Probably one or two in the gun." Amelia held out her hand and he dropped them into her palm. "Don't know what you plan on doing with them, though. They're fuckin' useless now. Want to get a few shots off before they eat you?"
She shot him a glare and found, to her surprise, he wasn't joking.
Every shot counted. Amelia knew that down the line, she would be glad she kept them.
"Let's look around for something useful."
"Knock yourself out."
Amelia spotted a still in a far corner, and crossed the shed to crouch in front of it. She hadn't seen one since she was a little girl. It was one of the many things about her childhood in the backwoods countryside she'd tried to leave behind when she went away to college in the city. It seemed ridiculous now, her attempt to reinvent herself as a city girl. If she could've done it over, she wouldn't have cared either way. She would've spent more time with her parents, and less trying to outgrow the neighborhood they'd made their home.
"It's a still." Nick told her.
"I know what it is."
"The fuck you do." Amelia took off its metal lid and peered inside. Nick took this to mean she didn't know what she was looking at. "It's for making booze. But that rig ain't fit to piss in."
"Stay close. I might need you to tell me what a tractor does."
"I'd be surprised if you didn't."
She looked up to the shelf above the still, lined with sealed jars of amber liquid. She took one and turned it over in her hands.
"What is that stuff?" Nick asked. "Let me see."
Amelia almost told him to get it himself. Then she thought of Pete and brought him the jar.
Nick didn't hesitate to break the airtight seal on the lid, twisting it off and smelling what was inside. To Amelia's surprise and mild disgust, he drank it. His entire body cringed and he brought down a fist onto the crate at his side. "Whiskey." After a few wordless seconds, he drank again and Amelia turned away, looking up to the ceiling and knowing, despite Nick's presence, she was alone with her thoughts again.
She wondered if it was as painful for other people. She listened to Nick take another swig and shudder after, and decided, yes, it was.
They were everywhere. Everywhere. They surrounded the shed on every side, and she knew what it meant. She took a deep, shuddering breath, still recovering from her crying fit, and looked to the shed doors. They shook and crashed loudly against the shelf, the walkers outside still trying to claw their way in.
The idea was looming over the horizon and she was a passenger on her own train of thought, barreling towards it; she could see it in the distance, she could even watch it approach if she wanted. But she couldn't stop herself from having a head-on collision with it.
She knew what had to be done, and she'd hoped to live the rest of her life without ever doing it again.
"We…" She hesitated, unsure he was even listening. He was disturbingly still, staring into the jar of whiskey without moving a muscle. "We need to get one of them in here."
He only answered her after a long silence, in a voice barely loud enough for her to hear. "What are you talking about?"
"We just…" Amelia put a hand to her face and shook her head, aware that she sounded certifiable and trying, trying with everything she had not to think about Clementine. "Just one. We'll pull it in through the door when we get a chance and-"
Finally, Nick looked up and made eye contact with her, his face as unfriendly as his tone. "Is this a fucking joke to you? Seriously, what are you saying right now?"
Amelia explained slowly, coming up with each word only after she said the one before it, trying to choose the right ones. Though she knew immediately after she spoke that there was nothing right about what she'd said. "If you cover yourself in their…in their guts, they can't tell you apart from one of them."
Nick stared at her like she'd spit in his face. He shook his head at her. Tried to find words – unpleasant ones, she assumed – but gave up. Amelia cleared her throat, wringing her hands and looking around the shed – up at the windows, at the door, everywhere but at Nick. One of her knuckles popped loudly under the pressure she was putting on her own fingers.
It's going to be fine. Say it again. It's going to be fine.
"I've done it. Clem and I got caught in a horde trying to leave the city." Amelia heard her own voice shaking and tried to will it to stop. Get it together. Get it the fuck together. Not that it ever worked. "If-if you walk slowly and don't make any noise, you can pass right through them." Still, nothing.
"They were right." Nick nodded to himself. He rolled the jar between his palms, his elbows propped on his knees.
Amelia waited for him to explain. He didn't. "About what?"
"You're fucking insane."
"I don't want to do this either," she could hear how defensive she was, and knew it was because the idea was as dangerous as it sounded, if not more. But here she was, insisting that he do it, and for what? Because she told him to? "Do I look like I want to do this?"
Nick tipped back his whiskey and killed the jar. He cringed hard and threw it aside, hard enough to break it when it hit the floor.
"Even if that wasn't crazy…" She started to speak and he didn't give her the chance, which she couldn't entirely blame him for.
"It-"
"And let's be clear, it's total horseshit…we'd never make it. It's at least half a mile back to the cabin and for all we know the entire forest is overrun. You think we can just walk through this, all the way back?"
"I know you don't have any reason to believe it works, but I promise-"
"-oh, you promise, huh?"
"-it'll get us back."
"Would you bet your life on that?"
No. The first and only time she'd ever done had been a nightmare. It was like walking a tightrope, half a misstep away from a screaming death. Even then, they didn't all leave her alone; she'd gotten the attention of a few walkers here and there. Making themselves reek like corpses would only take them so far. Who was to say they wouldn't get eaten ten feet from the door?
She didn't want to tell him this, and she couldn't bring herself to lie about it. Not now. All this idea had going for it was that it was something. Something had to be better than nothing.
Right?
Amelia saw the way Nick was looking at her, and asked herself if she was asking him to leave the safety of the shed and walk to his death. He clearly thought so.
She saw him getting angrier, and knew it was because she was pushing him. She regretted it, and wished it wasn't necessary while knowing she'd always believed regret and wishful thinking to be useless things.
But she needed him to listen. Beneath a cacophony of harsh truths – that she had no idea where Clementine was, that she would need to walk through the horde to get back to her, that it was very likely she would die horribly if she even attempted it – was another thought that sat quietly amongst them, and Amelia was well aware of its presence.
She couldn't do this alone.
"Nick, please-"
Nick raised his voice at her. "It's not going to happen."
Amelia could only take being yelled at for so long. She felt her temper flare up sharply, and turned to an automatic response, doing the same in return. "You could at least hear me out! Why are you giving up already?"
She expected him to yell back. But he broke eye contact and moved his gaze to the floor.
"Because my uncle's dead."
The shed was silent, save for the walkers moaning outside.
"He got bit. Back at the stream. Don't act like you didn't see it. He's going to die soon if he hasn't already." Amelia didn't know what to say. She tried to be indifferent to pain. She tried. Her problem was that it almost never worked.
She didn't like Nick. But she'd felt what he was feeling more than once. She wouldn't have wished it on anyone. "Just like that. He's just…gone." Nick shook his head and his voice cracked as he asked, "Can you believe that?"
Amelia wanted to do something to help. But she wasn't good at it, even with her own sister. She vaguely remembered a time when she had been, but it was long gone. The end of the world took nearly everyone she loved, and with it everyone she used to be comfortable talking to.
Nick had his head in his hands. He might have been sobbing quietly. Amelia couldn't tell. She approached him carefully and waited until he looked up. She took the lid off of her own jar of whiskey and held it out.
"To Pete." She phrased it like a question.
She wasn't sure what he would do. At first he stared at her like she'd made a poorly-timed joke. His eyes were bloodshot, making the blue of his irises stand out.
Is this how I looked at Luke when he tried to help me?
Before Amelia could answer herself, he picked up his jar and tapped it to hers in a lazy salute.
"To Peter Joseph Randall." he said bitterly. "The nicest mean old bastard I ever met."
Amelia hesitated, but took a small sip that burned all the way down. Putting it mildly, it was disgusting.
Nick tipped his jar back and drank half of it. When he finished, he coughed, shuddered violently, and dropped the rest on the floor. The jar shattered and whiskey seeped out in a growing puddle that spread underneath his shoes.
"Shit, that's…" Nick pressed his hands into his face. "That's…"
"Awful."
"Yeah. Get me another." Nick added, when Amelia didn't move, "Please."
"We can't do this right now." Amelia said. They needed to stay sharp if they wanted to have any chance of getting out. She wasn't about to throw her mental faculties out the window.
"Then don't do it." Nick already sounded a little slow, a little dull. He stood up on uncoordinated legs and tried to make his way toward the liquor shelf. Amelia stood in his way.
"We can get out of here. I mean it." His eyes were glazed over. Half-shut and not registering anything he was hearing. "We'll make it." She gestured over her shoulder to the shelf behind her. "But not if you do this."
Nick looked like he was considering this. Either that or he was trying to understand what she'd said.
"Are you going to move?"
10:08 am
Nick was wasted.
Amelia was angry.
The fact that one of them was having a good time did nothing to make her feel any better.
Amelia had been waiting. Watching the windows, the crack beneath the door, for a break. A brief silence, a stillness, anything to suggest there were few enough walkers outside for her to survive opening the doors. But there hadn't been for hours, not a single one. Only shuffling feet and incoherent noise. She was pretty sure the morning was almost over.
While she'd been trying to keep track of the hours that passed, Nick probably didn't know what day it was. He'd had so much to drink he could've been mid-blackout. Amelia didn't know why she felt disappointed; she'd already known he was a selfish prick.
"Hey." Nick said from behind her.
She ignored him. She had been for the last thirty minutes. But the alcohol made him persistent.
"Hey. Hello?" He laughed, apparently finding something about their situation funny.
Amelia felt her eye twitch.
Nick didn't stop. "Come on, are you going to stay quiet forever?"
Amelia kept her back to him. "Shut. Up."
These were her first words to him in hours. He reacted differently to them than she'd hoped.
"I would, but I'm about to die. So I don't have to listen to you." He slurred. A realization dawned on him. "I don't have to listen to anyone anymore. It's nice." He drank, finishing another jar.
"You're pathetic."
Nick had situated himself against the wall, next to the shelf for easy access. He sat in a bird's nest of garbage and half-empty mason jars. He clumsily reached above his head for another and struggled for a moment to twist the lid off. "You think?" He asked, amused as he went in for another sip. When he put the jar down, his expression had dropped. No more smile. Now he was grim, and defensive. "Why are you always so mad at me?"
Amelia didn't answer. Come to think of it, she was frequently mad at Luke as well. Sometimes Clementine. Almost always at herself.
She was angry at everyone, which meant two things: she had issues to work through...and Nick wasn't anything special.
"Come on. I want to know."
"You could've helped me." Amelia said.
"What?" Nick leaned forward, frustrated.
"You could've helped me. We could be getting out of here but you decided to get shitfaced." Amelia kept her back to him.
Silence.
"Giving up is nice. It's easy. I just want something to be easy for once."
"Then you deserve what you get."
Nick was quiet; he sounded like he was talking more to himself than to her. "I think I'm alright with that."
12:23 pm
Amelia laid flat on the plywood floor, passing the lighter she'd taken from the man at the river back and forth between her hands. She'd taken to counting the rotting holes in the ceiling, starting over every time she reached one hundred. There was nothing to do other than wait for a window of opportunity that probably wouldn't happen until it was too late. Clementine could've been anywhere by now. Pete must have been halfway to turning. Nick's group had probably left the area already. She only hoped they at least took Clementine with them.
"That's not fair."
This from Nick, who was still wasted and hadn't spoken in hours.
Amelia didn't ask. She didn't want to know.
That didn't stop him. "I don't…I don't give up all the time. I only do that when I'm already fucked."
"Like now?" Amelia asked dryly.
"Like now. Now you're getting it. When your situation's bad enough, there's nothing you can do. That's when you give up." Nick folded his arms behind his head and sank down against the wall.
"Just leave me alone." She didn't need any lectures about giving up, and hearing it from him made her want to throw something at him. She wouldn't admit to herself, and certainly not to him, that it was because thinking about it made her feel more guilt than she could handle.
Nick either didn't hear her or didn't care. "Know when your time's up. Luke doesn't know when his time's up. He just…he pushes too much. He doesn't know when to quit." He kept talking, but it didn't matter what he said. Amelia heard her own words in her own voice.
Remember how relieved you were when you thought you were dying?
Shut up shut up shut up shut up please just stop talking
"He always used to push me. I never wanted to go into business with him. I remember when he sold me on it. His big plan. Some fuckin' plan."
Some fuckin' sister. You were thrilled when you thought your time was up. Clementine was devastated, and going out into the world on her own, and you were relieved to be checking out early.
Amelia tuned him out. She realized she couldn't stop his train of thought and decided her energy was better spent trying to stop her own.
"A case of beer and he just said, 'Nick, we're burnin' daylight.' And that was that. After six months, we were flat broke. I didn't care. We were having fun."
Staring at the ceiling, Amelia applauded his story with a slow-clap. She did it loudly enough to drown out her own thoughts, and if it spited Nick, then that was an added bonus.
Nick scowled at her. "Whatever."
2:39 pm
Amelia had been considering making a run for it. No matter how she worked it out in her head, it was a stupid idea. There wasn't a way to do it that wouldn't get her killed. The idea was always followed closely by another: she could open the doors and try to grab a walker on her own. The thought provoked images of her lifting the shelf and immediately getting overwhelmed by the half-dozen walkers that poured through the door. They would pile on top of her and rip her to pieces while Nick slept off his morning bender.
Yeah, that's probably how it would go.
It wasn't doing much to stop her.
Is that because you think you'll make it or because you think you won't?
She ignored herself, knowing in the back of her mind, that was getting harder and harder to do.
She was just being impatient. All she needed to do was wait. Walkers moved as a horde. Eventually they would clear out.
"Amelia."
She was so surprised by this, she sat up. It was the first time Nick had ever used her name, and it got her attention.
Nick placed a sealed jar on the floor and slid it over to her. It only made it about halfway across the shed, but she could've reached it if she tried.
"Have a drink with me. And not that…girl-sip you took last time. That was embarrassing." He seemed to have sobered up. Not completely. His eyes were still inattentive and he occasionally slurred his "s" sounds. But he was less affected than he had been that morning. He cleared his throat. "Come on. Bury the hatchet."
Amelia lowered herself onto her back and rolled onto her side, turning away from him.
Nick sounded frustrated. "Seriously?" He mumbled to himself, and Amelia wasn't sure if she was meant to hear it when he said, "I hate it when you do that. Just don't say anything. Don't have a damn idea what you're thinking."
Amelia ignored him. She didn't force conversation when she had nothing to say.
"You're really not going to take it?"
Five seconds of silence.
"Fine." Nick said, opening his jar to drink on his own. "Whatever. Don't know why I expected you to drink whiskey. Probably couldn't handle it."
Please. He knew she was fresh out of her college years. And Amelia knew bait when she heard it.
"You probably couldn't do the hard stuff unless it's fruity and girly. Back before all this you probably drank, what? Wine coolers?" Nick laughed. It was loud and genuine. "Wait, wait…appletinis?" He laughed even harder.
Amelia remained silent, furious because he was right on both counts.
4:58 pm
89…90…91…92…
"Hey." Nick said.
93…94…95…
"Amelia."
Fuck off. I'm about to hit 100.
"Amelia, come on. We're not going anywhere. You might as well talk to me."
Shit. Amelia lost track, and no longer knew if she'd already counted the hole she was on. She hoped if she ignored him enough, Nick would give up trying to start a conversation. She wanted to go back to counting; it kept her from thinking too much.
1…2…3…4…5…
"I can do your side of the conversation if you want." Nick said. "Amelia, where are you from?" He pitched his voice in a horrendous impression of her that he probably wouldn't have found nearly as funny if he were sober. "Oh, I'm from the city. I went to a university and I-"
"Stop." Amelia turned over to face him. The sound of his voice was starting to give her a headache. An intense pounding behind her stitches, fixated just above her left eyebrow. "I'll talk to you if you just…stop."
"Deal."
There was a stiff silence when neither of them knew where to start.
"I'm not from the city. Clementine and I lived in the countryside. Then we moved to the suburbs. Georgia."
"I already told you we tried to start a business. What did you do before?"
"I was in school."
"Don't suppose you had a job? Probably not."
"I did." Amelia couldn't help feeling irritated. She knew where this was going.
"It was probably something easy-"
"-I'm done talking to you now-"
"-that you get just for being cute. You…host in a restaurant?"
Amelia turned away. Not listening.
1…2…3…4…5…6…
"Waitress?" Nick guessed. "Wait, what's it called when you make coffee?"
Amelia sighed. "Barista."
Nick's laughter filled the entire room. It made her jealous, and angry. Why did he get to feel happy?
"Does thinking you have me figured out make you feel any better?" she snapped.
Nick wiped a tear from his eyes as he tried to calm down from his laughing fit. "Nope." He said lightly, almost with a shrug. "Not at all."
He still smiled, and chuckled to himself every few minutes for the next hour.
6:09 pm
Nick broke the silence again. "Hey, will you tell me if I guess what you studied in-"
"Enough." Amelia surprised even herself with the volume of her voice. "I get it. You think I was spoiled and privileged and knew nothing about hard work and didn't deserve anything I had, and all of it is true. And it doesn't fucking matter anymore because that world and everyone in it is gone. Just leave me alone."
6:12 pm
"You sure you don't want that drink? You could use one."
8:39 pm
The sun was starting to go down. The collective mass of the walkers' legs blocked their view from the window; soon, they would sit in the dark, without even faint moonlight to let them see what was in front of them.
In the dimming light, Amelia flicked the lighter. It took three tries to get a flame, which she held until the heat began to burn her thumb. Then she let it die.
It had been at least twelve hours and the walkers were still there, like they knew she was still alive and wouldn't leave until she was one of them. Making a break for it was starting to look more and more appealing. She might make it. Stranger things had happened. She found her own thoughts bitter and sarcastic. What are they going to do? Bite me?
Yes, they would. Many times. They would tear her apart and leave just enough of her to get back up and spend her second life wandering aimlessly, killing and eating anything that moved.
Or would she? If a bite couldn't turn her, who was to say she would reanimate after death by another cause?
Her thoughts began wander absently to dark places. She wondered what it was like to die like that, to be infected with a virus that reanimated her body long after she was no longer in it. Every one of the walkers outside had once been a person. She wondered if any part of them was still there, trapped inside their own bodies, slaves to impulses they couldn't control. If that were true, it was possible they wanted to be put down.
She would, if it were her. If she really was able to die and stay dead, without Clementine having to shoot her through the brain, she'd consider that a blessing.
"Do you think you have me figured out?" Nick asked her.
Yes. "I have better things to do."
"Not right now you don't." Nick stirred in the bed he'd made out of empty trash bags. His back was turned to her and he spoke to the wall. "What's so bad about thinking I know a little about you?"
"You don't."
"I know what's easy to guess."
"No, you don't. You don't know me at all."
"Sure." Nick seemed to let the matter drop. This got Amelia's hopes up, until he spoke again. "I know that if we ran into each other before all this, you never would have talked to me."
Amelia thought it over. She thought of Nick, and his bad posture and perpetual scowl, and imagined seeing him in a bar somewhere. He exuded low self-esteem and a lack of patience.
"Probably not."
She reminded herself that she had her own self-esteem problems. They just didn't show as easily. She was impatient, and always had been, and she'd never been one to smile often. Given her privileged background and the kind of friends she spent her time with, someone like Nick probably wouldn't have bothered to start a conversation with her.
"Don't worry. You wouldn't have thought much of me either."
Nick was quiet for a minute. Then, "I didn't mean it like that."
Amelia recognized the olive branch and felt like swatting it away. "Are you just bitter then?" she asked cynically. "Do I remind you of a brunette who broke your heart?"
Nick let out a loud, sardonic laugh. "You don't know what you're talking about. She was a blonde and you don't look anything like her."
Amelia laid down, and decided to sleep.
4:34 am
Amelia dreamt of a beach. It was a familiar beach, one she'd thought of and visited in her sleep more often than she could count, at least in the past few years. She started in the same place she did every time: in the water. She opened her eyes as she broke the surface, surrounded by skies as clear and blue as the ocean she was in. She was out so deep she couldn't touch sand, and had to tread water to keep her head above the surface.
There were people on the shore, a lot of them. That was all she could say for certain. But she was too far away, and the sun in her eyes and the waves hitting her face made it impossible to see them clearly. She could make out colors and shapes, but other than that, a prodding sense of familiarity was all she had.
She thought she could see a white blouse. A lovely couple whose names she couldn't recall. The people waved to her, gestured for her to swim to the beach, as they did every time. And every time she thought of a vague memory, of a day a friend told her that he believed people never truly leave, that they wait to be reunited with everyone they loved and the people they shared the most important moments of their lives with-
The sound of shattering glass brought her back to the shed, in darkness and silence, laying on a rotten hardwood floor. She panicked, sitting up and looking around, expecting to see walkers breaking in through the windows. If that was happening, it would be the last thing she'd ever see. But there was nothing. For a moment, she thought she'd imagined what she'd heard.
It happened again and she turned to Nick, who was sitting up against one wall and throwing whiskey jars at the other. The pile of broken glass and puddle of liquid said he'd been at it for a while.
"What the hell are you doing?" she hissed. "You'll draw them in here!"
Nick threw another jar, forcing Amelia to stumble to her feet. If he wouldn't stop, she would make him.
"Nick!" she said. "Stop it!"
He arched his arm to throw another, stopped, and set it down. He didn't look at Amelia or acknowledge that she was there.
She didn't know what to say to him. In the time she'd been asleep he could've sobered up, given himself a chance to escape this shed alive. Instead he was drunk out of his mind, again. He screwed himself, and probably her as as well.
He cradled the jar in his hands, staring at it absently. There was something different about him. He seemed quieter, emptier.
It took her a moment to realize he was deeply, genuinely sad.
They spoke at the same time.
"Are-"
"I had to kill my mom."
Amelia was silent, this time because she didn't have any words. She sat down slowly, crossing her legs and facing him. She waited, unsure if he was going to speak again.
"It sounds weird when I say it out loud, huh?" Nick let the jar roll out of his hands, dropping it to the floor with a thud. "There was this girl. She came knocking on our door one night, just like you did. Hurt, scared. Hysterical. She was bit. She begged us to help her, take her in so those things wouldn't eat her alive. I didn't want to. Most of the group didn't want to. Luke did, of course. And my mom. They convinced everyone to go along with it. I never should have let them.
"We thought...we actually thought we could control it if we were careful. God, it was so fucking stupid. What the hell were we thinking?" Nick took a second to calm himself. After taking a slow breath, he went on. "She turned when we didn't expect it, and my mom was standing right there, and…" Another breath. "…and that's how it happened."
When Amelia didn't know what to say, she tended to go with something easy, and true.
"You didn't kill your mom. Something else did that."
"Doesn't make it any better." He said, his eyes empty.
"Yeah…" she agreed.
"It was my fault."
"You already know it wasn't."
"You sound like Luke." Nick sounded irritated. Whether it was at her or at Luke, she couldn't tell. Probably both of them. "I wish I was like him. I wish I could just keep moving all the time. I'm just not…built like that."
He didn't have to be, Amelia thought. She wasn't. Remembering the past served a purpose. She never forgot what she'd learned from it. It kept her alive.
"Everyone I grew up with. It all happened to them. Now, it's going to happen to us. We're fucked. This whole world is fucked. I mean, what's the point? We'll just march to some new place and somebody else will die. It's never going to stop. Eventually, it'll be our turn."
"I'm disappointed." she said.
"What?" Nick turned his head up just enough to glare at her.
"I'm disappointed. But not surprised." She said.
"Have you seen this place?" he snapped. "Even you have to know how fucked we are."
"You gave up the minute we got here. It doesn't matter where we are. If you really want to live, you'll find a way. If not, you'll let something kill you and say you did your best when you know you didn't."
You'll handcuff yourself to a radiator and send a nine-year-old out the back door of an empty jewelry store, armed with a gun that's almost too heavy for her to lift. You'll close your eyes and hope she makes it through the walkers and psychopaths until she meets someone with enough humanity left in them not to kill her.
"What do you want from me? The only two people who ever gave a shit about me are gone. They're dead. What do I have to go back to?"
"And what about Luke?" Look the other way, let it happen, and hope he'll be fine on his own, right? "He's your friend. Does that mean anything?"
Nick opened his mouth to argue with her, and couldn't find anything to say.
Amelia saw the pain in Nick's eyes, and put her head in her hands. She knew she was being unfair. Maybe she deserved her own harsh words; that didn't mean he did.
"I get it." She tried to make eye contact but he wouldn't look at her. He looked toward the door, his thoughts somewhere else. If her own experience was any indication, he was reliving the worst moments of his life; the ones that brought him here, drunk, sitting in garbage on a shed floor, and waiting to die. As if running through those moments over and over would let him change any of it. If he'd asked, she could've told him it would only make him feel worse.
Of course, he probably knew that by now.
She paused and waited for him to look at her. He didn't. "I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're not."
That got his attention. He didn't speak, but he watched her carefully, looking almost as if he didn't trust her. Maybe he thought she was only telling him what he wanted to hear.
"You're not alone, Nick. People care about you. That's a good enough reason to try."
"Luke will move on. He's good at that."
She shook her head. "He won't.
"You don't know him."
"Neither do you, if you think he would just get over-"
Nick raised his voice, but not by much. "I said, you don't know him. I've known him my entire life. I've seen things happen to him. He brushes them off like they're nothing."
"You're not nothing."
The look on his face said he thought otherwise.
Amelia took a breath and sat upright, running her hands over her knees and trying to think. Nick was walking a line, and she knew that she could easily push him in the wrong direction if she wasn't careful with her words.
"Last night, Carlos…made it very clear that he wouldn't let me pose any threat to the people in your house. So did Rebecca. No one gets protective like that over people who aren't important to them."
"It doesn't matter how important we are. We die. And when it happens, the rest of us pick up and leave. They go somewhere they know isn't any better than where they came from and wait for it to happen to someone else. We've all done it before. And it's what they're going to do when we don't come back."
Amelia's thoughts came back to her before she could stop them. Unless they're you. You don't know how to do that, do you? Not without letting the dead follow you.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. They weren't talking about her. She impatiently tapped her fingers on the wood floor, waiting to be left alone by that spiteful part of herself.
"You're mad at me. Of course you are." Nick ran a hand over his eyes, completely out of energy to put into arguing with her. "What did I do this time?"
He'd misunderstood what was upsetting her. But now that she thought about it, maybe she had a reason to be angry with him.
"You still have people around to miss you and you don't seem to care. At least you still have your friends, Nick. Mine are gone. If they were still around I wouldn't think about leaving them."
"Mine are going to be gone soon, too. I just went first." Nick didn't raise his voice, or match the harshness of her tone. She'd expected him to, having seen him do it more than a few times. But anger was for people who still had something worth being angry about. Nick didn't seem to think he had anything left. "If this is what life is, now, then fuck it. It doesn't mean anything anymore."
That's what this was about? Finding meaning in life despite the fact that death would eventually come for him, for all of them?
"It never did."
Nick looked at her, confused but no less hopeless. "What?"
"Living never meant anything in the first place. Not without people in your life to give it meaning." She realized what she was admitting, that she was going back on everything she'd insisted was true, to herself and to her sister. "We need other people. We're not meant to live our entire lives alone." She regretted taking this long to do it, and hoped she would get a chance to admit it to Clementine after telling her she was wrong all these years.
Clementine was right. Pete was right. Chuck was right. Everyone who'd told her to cut the shit and find a group to live with had been right. She'd been the one who was wrong. She'd been lying to herself while everyone around her implored her to be honest. Human beings needed other human beings. Amelia was no exception, as hard as she tried to make herself one.
"That's what life without meaning looks like."
They were both silent for a long time. They listened to the faint growls and choking sounds just outside the door. Somewhere behind it, Amelia could hear crickets chirping.
She wasn't expecting it when Nick finally spoke to her. "Do you really think we can get out of here? Don't lie to me."
She nodded, shocked that he actually sounded like he was considering it. "I know how crazy it sounds…"
Nick didn't look like he believed her. "I'm going either way. I just want to know if you think we'll actually make it."
Amelia was glad that for once, she could answer honestly. "I don't know. But I wouldn't do it if I didn't know it was possible."
AN: Thank you to BHBrowne for helping revise this chapter. If you haven't read any of BHBrowne's Walking Dead stories, I highly recommend them.