Eighteen Months Ago
Somewhere Outside Savannah's City Limits
Step. Tsssh. Step. Tsssh. Step-
Every passing step had Amelia more and more annoyed at the sound of her own limp. Her memory was hazy, but she recalled something about-
-she cracked his fingers, prying them from her own neck and bending them hard out of place, shattering two, maybe three-
-he screamed like an animal and threw her, sending her tumbling over an armchair, landing spine-first on the carpet and crushing her own knee under her body in a way it wasn't supposed to go-
The sound had driven her to an edge. The persistent, rhythmic dragging, to which she had no choice but to listen indefinitely, when all she wanted was to walk in silence had her feeling…
She couldn't find the word for it.
Then again, it wasn't the noise that had her feeling this way.
"-she wouldn't hurt a fly-"
"-you have to find Christa and-"
"-please don't make me leave you-"
Blackness and retching and handcuffs and screaming-
The handcuffs still hung from her right wrist, broken on one end.
She stopped. Something in her head prodded, reminded her that she didn't have time to kill if she was going to reach the state line before Christa and Omid and Clem-
-they're not going to wait for you-
-but she did it. Just to hear nothing, even for a moment.
The road in front of her stretched ahead for miles, straight and deserted and littered with the dead. And for some reason she couldn't come up with, she wasn't one of them. Her hand wandered to her own ribcage, her fingertips feeling along the edge of her newest scar. The skin felt hot. Angry and painful to the touch, as if it was still sick. The last part of her to fight off the infection. First in, last out.
She wiped the blood on the leg of her jeans, and kept walking.
Step. Tsssh. Step. Tsssh. Step. Tsssh-
Dead girl walking.
It was funny, when she thought about it. She was a walker, and also wasn't. She should have died, and didn't. Certainly felt like she had, if only on the inside. The irony stirred up a giggle in her chest, almost sent her into an uncontrolled, manic laughing fit.
She felt tilted. Not quite right, some place in her body, in some way she couldn't describe. Maybe her heart. Maybe her gut. Maybe her head. She was a day-
-days? She didn't know-
-past the worst night of her life, and the nightmare wasn't over. Not until she reached the imaginary line someone somewhere had drawn in the sand to separate Georgia from its neighboring states. Because if she didn't beat them there they would leave without her because who waits for a dead girl and she wouldn't know where to find them after that. They'd disappear into the ruins of the United States and that sick fuck with the bullet in his head would still ruin her life from his shallow grave in the Marsh House-
-it's more like a shallow closet, really-
-because even dead, he made sure she never saw her sister again and if that happened Amelia would have an uncontrollable need to do something drastic and no one to take it out on but herself and-
She stopped herself, and took a shuddering breath.
She hoped it wouldn't come to that. And at the same time wanted to see it for the same reason she'd never been able to look away from fireworks or car wrecks.
She knew a light push would send her spiraling, past reason and fear and things that kept her alive and straight into madness. Impulsiveness and destructiveness and a full implosion of everything she'd tried to hold together since the morning Clem went missing. With her anchor gone, her only reason to show care and foresight and regard for her own safety was somewhere in the wind. Around sixty miles away. Soon to be hundreds.
She kept walking. She was alone and unarmed, filthy and empty. Drenched in blood that belonged to her and blood that did not and deeply, morbidly afraid that she would miss her sister at the last meeting place they'd ever arranged.
Fragile. The word she'd been looking for.
Not fragile like flowers or glass. Fragile like a grenade without a pin.
Handle with care.
She heard the motor of an approaching truck getting louder, and kept walking. They would stop if they wanted to. They would shoot her if they wanted that, too. She had a handgun with no clip and no bullets-
-the radiator screamed, metal on stone, carving deep scars into the concrete floor. Thin, jagged lines punctuated by little piles of ground rock where Amelia had stopped, unable to go any further in a single drag. She stopped once she was in the booth, an arm's length away from the twice-dead security guard. Her free hand wandered over his belt, across a wallet full of worthless paper and a walkie talkie she never wanted to see again. She vaguely remembered a time when she used to mutter an apology before doing this.
Her fingers closed around a key ring, ripping it with enough force and impatience to tear it from his belt loop. She looked over each of the four keys on the ring and knew they wouldn't fit. She tried them anyway.
"No…no, no-" She checked the belt again. Dipped into each of his pockets – even barrel rolled his corpse just to check the back ones – and found nothing. She pulled his handgun from his hip. It was light. Tilting it upside-down, she could see into the grip, straight into the chamber. No magazine.
"Mother-" She stopped short. Clenched both fists in an immediate and hot spike of anger and punched him once in the chest. "-fucker!"
Sat on the floor, she swung her gaze out toward the garage doors reaching from ceiling to floor. The only thing keeping the dead out. She could hear them. See the shadows of their feet shuffling and dragging in the thin slice of light below the door.
Propped against the wall, on the other side of the room was a hammer.
-and wasn't going to be able to stop them from doing either. So she didn't turn around, not until-
"BANG."
She waited. Stopped and looked sideways just enough to see the man in the driver's seat of the old beater Chevy that had pulled up next to her. He wore a hat. It was all she noticed and all she cared to notice. She didn't plan on being around him long.
His truck, on the other hand-
"I just killed you."
Unfortunately, you didn't.
She would look back on today as the earliest she could remember thoughts like that creeping to the surface when she wasn't paying attention. Bitter, self-destructive ideas that she didn't think she meant but wasn't sure anymore. It would happen many times after, but this was the first.
"You're either stupid as fuck or you think you're tough shit. Or both, I guess." No comment. There had been days – recent days – when she'd thought both of those things to be true. She finally turned to face the truck and look at him. She thought about throwing him the standard I don't want any trouble but that never stopped her from finding it anyway. "You keep on like that and you'll get killed eventually. Ain't none of my business."
"Can I get a ride?" she said, well aware of what she was asking. As she said it she watched a lightning-fast slideshow of a dozen horrifying ways this could end, half of them ending with her killing him and half the other way around. Every one of the paled next to the fact that this man had a running truck, one that could get her to her destination in an hour, compared to three days. She may or may not have been about to catch Clementine at the pace she was going. If she had a truck, she knew she would.
And she'd risk her life for that. Or kill for it.
The stranger-
-don't call him that, don't call anyone that ever again-
-changed his posture, smugness and leisure fading – if only a little – into assessment. Caution. She wondered if it would be presumptuous to think she was guessing his thoughts; that her eagerness to get into his car was making him second-guess whether he should let her in. He frowned and looked her over with a face that didn't look inherently mean but could probably go there in a second. She'd seen the same look in her own.
"Where're you trying to go?"
"State line."
There was a silence, and Amelia pointed in the direction she'd been walking. Down the long, arrow-straight road that disappeared into the horizon.
"What for?"
None of your fuckin' business, that's what.
"Careful." He said. The way the word rolled out quick and light didn't distract from the warning behind it. "These ain't times to go pissing off strangers,"
She froze. Replayed the last five seconds in her head once, twice, realizing she'd spoken out loud, and realizing he'd actually said what he said. She felt a grin spread across her face like a crack in a windshield, erratic and sudden and wide. She should have been worried that she'd spoken without thinking, without even realizing it until someone told her, but a laugh stirred in the middle of her chest, toxic bubbles rushing to a boiling surface because he had no idea. Her sister brained a man with a lamp and she left a corpse rotting in a closet and she might never see her again and he had no fucking idea. The irony was too much, even for her.
"Oh." He narrowed his eyes, watching her stifle her giggling into her hand like he was watching something he might see at a circus. A sword-swallower or a woman folding herself in ways her spine shouldn't have been able to bend. "You're not tough shit." There was understanding in the way he blinked. Some clarity in the way nodded slowly while she took a sharp inhale, out of breath and trying to collect herself enough to speak. "You're just fuckin' crazy. Full-on nutcase…"
Finally, she managed a ragged breath. Her stomach was sore. "Thanks for the warning, dude," Where were you three fucking months ago? She shook her head, not about to explain. You had to be there. "I already pissed off the wrong stranger. Can I get a ride or not?"
He considered it. Amelia knew the look of someone pretending to mean what they said, but didn't see it on him.
"I don't know…you're obviously off your fuckin' rocker." He inched the bill of his hat up just enough to scratch at his hairline. "And not in the hot, weird-in-the-sack way. I'm talking the needles-and-straitjackets kind of way. No…" His eyes gave her a cautious once-over, head to toe. Taking in the cuffed wrist and the bruised face and clothes covered in the black tar-like substance she hoped he'd assume was mud. "…offense."
Amelia tried not to snort. He didn't care who he offended any more than she did. "None taken." The gun was out before she even tried to come up with a better plan. Leveled at his head through the passenger side window. Empty and useless, but he didn't need to know that. "Get out of the truck."
Something changed in his face, something dark and sudden. A crack in his personality, an abyss that opened in the blink of an eye and swallowed the person he'd seemed to be until now. She didn't like it. Anger looked volatile on him. The center of his attention was a dangerous place to be when he was like this. She could tell. She remembered Christa saying something similar about her once. Sometime after-
-she grabbed a handful of Ben's hair and launched his head forward into the window, leaving a fist-sized crater of cracked glass and blood-
It didn't scare her so much as it sparked that same morbid fascination she thought she'd already put to bed. That bored, needling feeling somewhere in her that made her want to tempt fate. Kick the bomb just to cause an explosion, because some volatile whispering in the back of her head was telling her it was even better to watch the blast from the center.
"That ain't very fuckin' nice, kid."
She didn't smile. She wasn't joking. "I'm not a kid, I'm not nice, and I just need a ride." She gestured for him to open his door and step away with a movement of her useless weapon. "Out."
He did it so calmly that she started to wonder then and only then if she'd fucked up. She kept the barrel on him as he stepped out of the driver's side without closing the door. He moved around the hood of the truck, motor still running, with the posture and speed of someone who either knew he wasn't about to be shot or wouldn't have cared if he was.
He didn't stop at a distance, like she expected. He took one, two, three steps into her arm's reach. until he backed her against the passenger door with the barrel pressed to his chest. She realized too late that even if the gun had been loaded, she'd still made a grave error in judgment.
Amelia muttered, a near-silent whisper. "Fuck."
"Yeah. 'Fuck' is right."
He snatched the gun from her hand in a single, fluid motion. Disarmed her in a spiteful grab that could only be done by someone who didn't consider it – or her – a threat. It took him all of the next three seconds to notice the gun was light. He turned it down, looking into the empty space where the magazine should have been.
Amelia waited, leaning back against the passenger side door. She crossed her arms, bristling with impatience while he looked from the gun to her, then back to the gun again trying to figure out how to respond. She wondered vaguely if he was about to kill her for threatening him. Maybe pistol-whip her with the gun since she hadn't given him any bullets to shoot her with. If he stood like this long enough, she'd make another attempt for the truck. Maybe head butt him in the nose and just run for the driver's side. One stupid idea deserved another. She didn't care which of them happened, only that something happened in the next thirty seconds because the waiting was making her itch behind the eyes-
"Are you fuckin' shitting me with this?" He asked her suddenly.
The pause that came after suggested the question wasn't rhetorical.
"No?"
He shook his head, a grin tugging one corner of his mouth up into an expression of mixed reactions even he didn't seem to understand yet. A part of him found it funny, that much she could tell. "You're gonna threaten me with an empty gun?" Again, he waited for an answer. She didn't give one this time. "I almost killed you, girly!"
"Whoops."
"'Whoops.'" he repeated, laughter bubbling beneath his voice. Amelia stared, reaching for the door handle behind her back, thinking about yanking it open and slamming the window into his face. Now she understood the look he'd given her during her laughing fit. On someone else, it was easier to see. Easier to be mildly disturbed seeing laughter where it didn't belong, at something that wasn't funny to her like it was to him. "Fuckin' whoops…"
He recovered, calm again when he asked, "What's your name?"
She watched him carefully. If he'd been about to attack her, he might have done it already. She reminded herself that thinking his decisions made any sense was a hell of an assumption to make. But he looked thoughtful. Like he was considering something. Amelia had an idea of what, since she'd only asked him for one thing.
"Amelia."
He snorted. "Old lady name, but alright." She couldn't say she disagreed. If it was a name for women who'd lived into their seventies and eighties, women who had children who had children, then it was certainly one she would never fit. She couldn't guess when and where she'd fall short, but she knew she'd never make it that far. No one did anymore.
The man threw his hands out in a gesture brief and lazy enough that she could only recognize it as a shrug. "Alright. Hop in."
Amelia should have moved. It was what she wanted, all she wanted. But the confusion was maddening, the curiosity like a gun to her head. A loaded one. "Seriously?"
He dropped her gun into the truck. Tossed it through the open passenger window like a hollow, metal frisbee. "You're gonna get eaten out here otherwise and I'm bored." He reached for the door handle, and she finally moved to step out of the way.
"You're bored." She might have sounded as incredulous as she felt had she not been so exhausted. Listening to herself, she sounded more irritated than confused.
"That's what I said." He matched her tone, his words hardening as the ease and humor about him disappeared, if only for a second. She expected him to open the door, but he lingered where he stood, gripping the handle without using it. "Don't try that shit again. You try to steal from me again, I'll get your throat out. I don't care who you are or where you're trying to go, you get me?"
She should have been more careful with her words. She could have been quiet. So far she'd only seen strange and erratic things from this man, whoever he was, and everything about this conversation was hissing at her to tread carefully around him, but something else in her only wanted her sister back, the same part of her that saw how serious he was and just didn't fucking care.
"I promise not to steal your stolen truck."
His face relaxed, smiling half a smile and giving her a nod of approval. "I hope you mean that." The door was open, a metal and plastic barrier between the two of them that almost hit her across the face as it swung out. "Come on. Scoot."
She was staring up at a light. She couldn't tell if it was daylight or something fake and fluorescent but she knew the colors around her looked wrong. Drained.
She was laid out flat on a hard surface. She remembered something about her head, tried reaching up to touch her own face but a hand gently pushed hers back down, leaving it pinned to the floor at her side.
There were voices. Familiar voices with accents out of a cartoon, she thought, and-
One was more familiar than the rest. Smaller and kinder and very worried.
"Amelia-"
"Hold her still." She still knew Carlos' voice when she heard it. If someone had asked her why he sounded like he was underwater, she couldn't have told them.
She hadn't realized she'd been moving.
Amelia crossed her arms over her stomach, hoping to lean enough pressure to make the nausea rolling around inside her go away. She thought she'd thrown up the last of the black stuff. Then again she had no reason to think it would only happen once. She imagined hacking it up onto the bench between the driver and passenger seats. She'd probably find it funnier than he would.
She slouched down on the passenger side, sinking down until she sat low in the seat. She almost couldn't see over the dash, which was all fine and good to her since all she wanted was to wait out the last of straggling symptoms from the night before. The sick stomach. The headache. She'd just started to wonder if the violent shivering had run its course when she felt her insides shaking, bringing with it the familiar and agitating sensation of freezing and sweating at the same time.
A look over her left shoulder, one that was supposed to be quick and subtle, showed her the man was watching, without even trying to look like he wasn't. He looked confused. Maybe mildly disgusted.
She was about to give him the automatic defense – a pointed the fuck are you looking at – when he nodded to her feet, bringing her attention to a shapeless lump of fabric balled up and thrown into the foot well. "Found that in a rolled car a way's back. Take it."
She looked to him, then back to the floor, expecting him to say something else because people, especially strangers, didn't just give things away for nothing. When she'd hesitated long enough to realize he was done talking, she reached down, pulling up what she found was an oversized sweatshirt.
"Yeah?" she said, waiting for the but. The and. The sure, if-. The unnamed price that came with everything that looked like it was free.
He didn't look away from the windshield. Lifted one shoulder in something too lazy to be called a shrug. She didn't miss the way his nose wrinkled when he slid a quick look to her blood-soaked clothes. "I ain't gonna want it back."
She opted for politeness. She could stomach it as long as she kept it to three words or less. "Thanks."
His thoughts already seemed to be somewhere else. "Mhm." He ignored her while she unbundled the sweater. He looked uninterested in what she was doing until she held it up by the shoulders, staring at the emblem on the front. "What?"
She didn't answer, running a finger over the Georgia State initials, emblazoned proudly with the school colors. It made her feel something she couldn't name. Some mix of nostalgia and whatever else she could call the sadness that came with missing things that were long in the past and long gone.
"It's where I went to school."
"Well, la-dee-fuckin'-dah."
She shoved her arms through the sleeves and pulled it over her head, finding a silver lining that she wouldn't have to look at the emblem for as long as she was wearing it.
"Name's Nate." He talked to the windshield. "Thanks for, uh, asking…" She recognized the point he'd meant to make, and hoped she hadn't done anything to make him think she felt rude for not asking.
He reached under the steering wheel with his free hand, pawing around the pedals looking for something. He grunted as he pulled back up, his hand wrapped around the neck of a forty. A brand she didn't recognize. It occurred to her that the green tint to the bottle had been darker, once upon a time when the bottle had been full. He tipped it back, sending what was left – maybe a quarter of the bottle – splashing around, clinking against the glass.
He hid his grimace well. She knew there was one, but wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't been looking for it. He held it out, one hand on the wheel and half his attention on the road in front of them.
"Here you go."
She rubbed her eyes with her palms, pinching the bridge of her nose and willing the headache pounding mercilessly behind her forehead to go away. A variation of the truth was truthful enough. Here, anyway. "Already hung-over."
"Best cure for a hangover's more booze."
She looked up, finally moving her head to look directly at him in the driver's seat. He wasn't wrong. She took it – moving faster than she'd needed to, like he might bite if she left her hands near him for too long – and knocked back half of what was left.
She didn't hide her shot-face as well as he had. She shuddered hard enough to make him chuckle. "Hell of a kick, but it takes the edge off."
Right again. The warmth started in her fingertips and radiated up into her face. She felt her cheeks flush and realized too late she could have checked the ABV on the bottle-
-fucking 48%-
-before going in headfirst like that. Like nearly every other time she'd drank in her life, it had been poorly planned and irresponsible but it was also the first time in the last six months she could remember feeling anything pleasant. As a coping mechanism, she was starting to see the appeal.
She tried not to dwell on it, knowing she'd kill the bottle if she thought about it for too long. She handed it back to him before she could. He took it and dropped it back into his foot well, apparently saving the last few ounces for a day rainier than this one.
"So, uh." He passed time by tapping his hands in rhythm on the steering wheel, rapping his fingertips between eleven and one o'clock. Stuck a finger in his ear, scratched around, and wiped what he'd found on the front of his jacket, none of it discretely. She couldn't tell if he was trying to come up with conversation, or hesitating to say something he already had in mind. Either way, she wished he wouldn't. "Who'd you piss off?" He slid a glance sideways at her and shook his head. She wouldn't have been surprised if he whistled. "Someone chewed you the hell up and spit you back out."
She hoped that if her answers were brief and boring enough, he'd change the subject. Or stop talking to her altogether.
"The dead."
He chucked. Shook his head again. "Nice try. Those freaks don't bleed red anymore." He looked sideways again, making a quick once-over of the blood stains still visible below the waist. "That's all you. Maybe your stranger?"
She stayed quiet, hoping her silence was enough to tell him to take a fucking hint.
He didn't get it. Maybe on accident, probably on purpose. "Come on, you've got to have a good story."
"He took my sister."
She spoke without thinking, or knowing why. She had a vague idea about sharing being like draining poison from her veins, painful and bloody but leaving her better off when it was over.
That, and she wasn't going to know him long. She intended to ditch him by the end of the day. One or both of them would die young regardless, and take all her secrets with them. Maybe the question wasn't why but why not?
He nodded, mumbling some non-word that came out sounding like mmf. He waited for her to continue and got silence. "And?"
She just stared forward at the dash. Her next words weren't coming up easily and she had no desire to force them. She'd been wrong to think she would go into the details today. It was too long of a story. Too crowded with people she didn't want to think about, people who either died far too soon or not nearly soon enough.
"I took her back."
"…alright then." Nate raised an eyebrow but kept his eyes on the road. She knew it was intentional, since the road in front of them was empty for miles. Nothing to look at and nothing to drive into. "Don't drown me in the details."
She wouldn't.
"He still alive?"
She only turned her head to look at him. She didn't have any more words for him. Her story wasn't one full of surprise endings and plot twists; she wasn't about to tell him what could've been easily guessed.
He whistled, low and slow. "That's cold. Stone fuckin' cold." Back to the road, driving in silence. Amelia considered counting mile markers, or dashes of the lane that separated theirs from the other. Or corpses they passed on the shoulder. "You're a tough lil' nut, Amy, I'll give you that."
One…two…three…
She spotted another, mangled and facedown in the bushes. Trying to crawl missing a leg and most of one arm.
"It wasn't just you and your sister, right? You must have been with a crew-"
"Can we just drive?"
He snorted. "'We?' You want to sit in my lap?" He laughed again, to himself, at her, she didn't know and didn't care.
"I'm going to make this really clear." She pulled her eyes away from the dash, away from the glove compartment that she'd have bet was hiding a gun and looked directly at him. "If you try to put hands on me, you and me will go at it. I'll try my best to kill you, and before you start making jokes my best is better than you think. Maybe you'll win. Maybe you won't. But if I can't end your life I'll at least ruin your fucking day."
The alternative hung in the air, having already been said. Or we can just drive.
She could see in his face, not even three words after kill that he didn't take her seriously. She might not have taken herself seriously, if she hadn't been there to witness the last three months of her own life. She might have sounded funny to someone who didn't know what she'd learned from everyone who'd come tearing into her life before he did. She clearly did to him.
She wondered if he'd still laugh when her fingers were in his eyes.
"Since we're bein' so…clear with each other…" she watched his face change, just like it had before she'd gotten into the truck. A crack in the ground that opened up quickly and silently. It swallowed up the perpetual smirk and the morbid sense of humor and left only a man who'd probably committed more murders in his life than she had, and was willing to prove it. "If you threaten me again I might just take the safe route and kill you. Because you are clearly unstable as hell."
Amelia watched him carefully, before she sank back into her seat and went back to watching the road. As long as they understood each other.
Silence. Mile markers passed them by. One, then another.
Five dead walkers…six…had she left off on four or five?
"Look, I'm…" he hesitated, something she hadn't expected from him since hesitation was for people who were careful with their words. He scowled at the windshield. "…sorry…if I freaked you out, or…"
She wasn't sure where this was going. Her first thought was that it was a setup. A long game leading up to a sarcastic punchline of epic proportions. Real and false sincerity were getting difficult for her to tell apart. She watched him in her peripheral and waited.
"We all got our own way of…coping with shit. I was just screwin' around. I didn't think you'd take it like…whatever." He looked out the driver's side window, making her think the windshield wasn't distant enough for him. Then, he was back. "I was serious when I said I'd kill you. But you seem alright, and I'd rather not put one in your head. So don't make me."
Sure.
"Whatever."
He nodded, one arm draped lazily over the steering wheel, tapping an inconsistent rhythm with his fingers again. "Whaaatever…" he mumbled.
Seven…she thought. She'd lost count again.
"Hey, Amy."
She didn't answer right away. She didn't like the tone of his voice. If she wasn't sure whether his words were a setup before, she was sure now. He might as well have said knock knock. She didn't answer but she looked, if for no reason other than to keep an eye on him. Whatever his joke was, it was going to be unfunny at best and fucking dangerous at worst.
His mouth twitched the way it did on someone who was trying not to smile. "You bored?"
She almost shook her head, but avoided it. She didn't want to give a yes/no answer to a yes/no question. Whatever game he was playing, she wanted him to know he was doing it alone. "What-"
Nate stepped on the gas. Floored it, leaving Amelia thinking he was about to wrap them around a tree while the momentum pressed her back deep into the cushion of the seat. But he brought the truck to a screeching stop as quickly as he'd sped it up, slamming the brakes hard enough that Amelia almost knocked her head into the dash.
She looked at him, incredulous. "The fuck are you-"
A loud slam just to her right made her jump, got her to look over her shoulder at the walker pressing itself into the passenger window, rotten palms flat against the glass. She brought her legs up onto the seat, putting her feet between the door – the walker – and herself while scooting back along the seat to gain distance.
"Are you fucking-" she cut herself short, watching it. It snarled and gnashed its teeth at her against the glass, no longer able to tell that there was a barrier between her and it.
She looked down at the door, eyes running over the plastic interior looking for the only thing that could've made it worse, hoping of all things that this asshole didn't have power windows-
"Here, I'll help you out," he said, as her window began to crawl down into the crevice within the door. The corpse snaked its arms through the crack, which widened when Nate didn't let off the window control. He didn't until the window was down completely and the walker was reaching in shoulders-deep, grabbing at her ankles and slipping every time she kicked her feet. "Have at it, girly."
She pulled her feet out of its grip again and again, floored because she didn't know her blood could reach its boiling point this quickly. Her heart pounded, not with fear or adrenaline or any of the reactions she'd become accustomed to but with anger and vindictiveness and an overwhelming urge to break something. He thought this was a joke. Thought the Stranger was a joke, thought she was a joke, clearly, since he seemed to think endangering her life was some kind of punchline. This was what he'd stopped the car for. This was why she wasn't getting any closer to Clementine but sitting in a shit-cheap car and listening to him laugh at her like any part of this was funny.
She leaned forward for a quick second, just long enough to pop the latch on the door, planted on foot flat on the handle, and kicked hard, all rage and no restraint. The door flew out, the frame of the open window slamming into the walker's forehead-
-Nate's laughter gave way to a "Woah-"-
The impact was enough to send the walker stumbling out into the lane and the door flying back into place, clicking shut. Amelia went for the handle again, snapping it open impatiently and stepping out of the car. She went straight for the walker, no time to reconsider, no time to calm herself and think carefully about her actions. She was angry and angry made her stupid and stupid got people killed but she didn't fucking care-
-she grabbed the walker – once a blonde-haired woman about her own height – by the collar of her torn flannel and pulled her back toward the car, bending her at the waist and throwing her head first into the body of the truck. The skull left a dent in the bed. The walker dropped face down onto the pavement, growling a broken growl, reaching out with reflexes far too slow. Amelia picked it back up with a handful of its hair, half-expecting it to come out in her fingers, pulling its upper body just enough to level it with the open doorway of the car with her free hand on the door and-
SLAM
SLAM
SLAM
She knew that was enough. Knew the cracked skull and limp arms meant she was done, she'd won, it was over. Knew it and ignored it while Nate overcame his shock and whistled again and grew a smile she didn't know what to make of.
"Yeah," he clapped once, twice, three times. "Amy-"
SLAM
"-knows how to-"
SLAM
"-party!"
SLAM
She dropped the body only when the skull was broken wide open, dripping thick, slow liquid she knew wasn't all blood. She left it laying at her feet, breathing heavily and stepping back into the truck. She wondered if Nate would tell her to get back out, before remembering that it was a stupid thought. Anyone else might. And somehow she'd happened across the one person who wouldn't.
She leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees and rubbing her hands over her face. The anger rush was over. All the energy she'd found in a spike of white-hot rage leaving her as quickly as it had come.
"Can you. Fucking. Drive." Now all she had was a need to get to the state line before her sister. It was all she'd ever had, she realized, now that the rage was no longer there to distract her. "I'm in a hurry."
"Can do, Amykins." He shifted the truck into gear and peeled back onto the road, leaving her to reach out and pull her door shut when they were already moving. "Can do."
She remembered swearing. Loudly. Angrily. Repeatedly because she hoped with each one that this would be the fuck or God damn it to make the throbbing in her head stop.
She remembered her arms being useless, every time she tried to lift a hand to grab someone or take a swing they stayed glued to the floor, held down by a knee or another hand pressing enough weight in on her wrists to cut off circulation.
"Amelia, that's enough-" she heard, more than once.
She wanted to say the same in return that's enough drilling into my goddamn head but the words would only come out in screams.
She hadn't said a word to him for the better part of an hour before they pulled into the gas station, and didn't intend to for hours after. Nate killed the engine and leaned back in his seat, passing time working up to what was about to be his third attempt to start a conversation since she'd gone silent.
"Don't be mad." It was dismissive. Exasperated with the amount of time she'd committed to giving him the silent treatment. Come on, Amy, really. As if she was the irrational one between the two of them.
At worst, it was a tie.
"Fine. Be mad. See if I give a shit."
She'd propped an elbow on the door and tried not to smirk. She thought about putting her feet up on the dash. She could wait. Longer than he could, she'd have bet. See if I give a shit. Sure. Nate liked to talk, she'd decided. He liked to hear himself talk, which wasn't any fun without someone to listen and argue back.
He pointed to the dash in front of her. "There's a gun in the glove. Give it here."
Sure.
She popped the lever, grabbed the handgun inside, and threw it over her shoulder, all without looking at him. Maybe it'd hit him in the face. Maybe he'd reach fast enough to catch it but not without pulling the trigger and sending a bullet flying into the cab. Any of the above was fine by her.
She heard the gun clattering against something, heard him grunt and hoped it was because the gun caught him by surprise and hit him in the nose. "Come on, it was a joke." He said, getting his hand around the grip and dropping the magazine out to count the bullets. He pushed it back into place with a solid, heavy shhk. "I wasn't gonna let it get-"
"It could have killed me, you asshole," Amelia muttered, stared out her window, running her eyes across the empty diner behind the fuel pumps.
"Now that's a joke," he said, pulling her attention away from the diner's dark windows. "You weren't scared of that thing, you damn near-"
"You've never seen anyone pulled through a window before?"
"I mean, yeah, but that's-"
-BANG-
Both their windows shattered in what seemed like the same second. Through the shock and flying glass and the split-second of blank thought while she tried to understand what the fuck had just happened-
"-getthefuckdown-"
-she watched Nate go for his door handle and dive out onto the pavement. She flattened herself down onto the fabric seats, realizing as she crawled her way over the layer of broken safety glass that the windows hadn't broken at the same time, but were shattered one after another by the bullet that flew through the truck without hitting either of them-
Amelia dragged herself out of the cab, dropping down to join him on the ground and sweeping the glass down with her. It scattered across the ground at their feet as Amelia pressed her back against the truck, sure to put herself behind the rear tire in case their attacker thought to shoot low.
"Fuck…" she muttered, but the first time wasn't enough. They weren't just fucked, they were fucked, capital-F Fucked. She swore not at Nate and not even at the gunman taking shots at her, but at herself, for the choices she'd made that led her here, reaching all the way back to we get that boat- "Fuck-"
Nate looked puzzled in a way she'd only seen on him once. "You haven't been shot at in three months?"
Well.
I mean…
Yeah.
But she wasn't about to admit it. She shook her head. "I shouldn't have come with you."
"Yeah well." Nate said it like her words and all the weight they carried rolled right off of his shoulders. "It's too fuckin' late now."
Did he just fucking shrug-
Whatever answer she may have had was silenced, violently pushed out of her head as her attention was drawn away by the gunfire. A bullet ricocheted against the passenger door. Another clipped the rearview mirror, cracking its surface and knocking it from its hinges.
"We have to get around the side of the building." He crouched behind the driver's side tire, inching his head past the bumper just far enough to peek at the shooter. Amelia noticed the way he was balanced on his toes, and considered shoving him. "Go from cover to cover." He turned back to face her, closing the window of opportunity she was sure she didn't want, despite the fact that she was still thinking about it.
He put a hand out, leaving Amelia to stare at the gun he was offering her. "You can cover me first. You cover me, then I'll cover you. Or if you want to go first that's fine, too." She took it without answering, remembering that even silent answers could be misleading.
He said something along the lines of keep his head down and wait until and throw the gun, every word dancing vaguely around her head without meaning anything.
"Sure." She answered, taking a guess at whatever instructions he'd given her because some part of her was already whispering that it wasn't going to matter.
Then she was staring down the sight, barrel aimed at the dead center of Nate's back. If she leaned forward, she'd press it right between his shoulder blades.
He glanced back once, then again when he recognized what he was looking at. "Come on! Are you serious?" He turned, facing her with one knee down on the pavement. "That's good. Good one, kid." He might've been waiting for her to say something. She wasn't planning on it. The gun point-blank in his face said more than enough for her. "Come on…" And then, of all things: "I know you."
She didn't like the certainty behind the words. She spat out her answer- no you don't- dismissive and bitter. Tried to avoid thinking that one of them was bluffing, and then asking herself whom.
"You don't take shit like this and walk away." He nodded at his truck, at the gunman still planting bullets in the passenger side from across the parking lot. "You want to get this fucker as much as I do."
Wrong on both counts. "I want to get to the state line." She tried to ignore the way her trigger finger itched at the joint, out of some kind of need to shoot something, anything, anyone. But she didn't have time for that. She could argue with Nate for the rest of the night, engage the shooter in a gun fight and then a knife fight and then a fist fight if it came to that. But she'd spent the night miles out from the state line. She'd miss the sunrise and her sister with it.
Clementine first. "Good luck with this."
Nate's face darkened again, and his next words hit the concrete like nails dropping, hard and pointed. "You're just gonna take my gun and turn tail?" She knew the game he was playing even before his next words came out. He was prodding at her, maybe even hoping she was dense enough to do what he wanted just to prove him wrong. "Didn't peg you for a coward."
She made her own words just as venomous, sharping them on a whetstone made of grief and guilt left over from the people who'd come into her life – and left it – before he did. "I'd leave it if I didn't think you'd shoot me in the back."
"Funny, seein' how you're the one with a gun in my face…"
"Don't make this worse than it already is." You've done enough. She managed not to say it out loud, but her night had been thoroughly fucked thanks to him-
-never mind the fact that it wasn't his fault he picked a gas station that had apparently been taken over by trigger-happy squatters-
-and the first step in her damage-control plan – a fragmented and panicked one, but a plan all the same - was to cut and run. Ditch any and all liabilities. Leave Nate behind and hope he wouldn't follow her and bring his specific brand of mentally unstable bullshit with him.
Because he's the only one of the two of you who's not quite right upstairs.
Nate's face was unreadable, but more calm than she was comfortable with. Whether it was because he was used to staring down the barrels of firearms aimed in his face, or like a psychopath, he wasn't capable of feeling fear, she didn't know and didn't care to know. It wasn't impossible that the answer was both.
"Either give me the gun or do something with it, because we both know you're not gonna-"
BANG Amelia fired a single round somewhere over Nate's shoulder, the words shouldn't have said that ringing in her ears as the recoil reverberated through her palm. They overlapped with Nate's "Fucking shit-" shouted with a full-body flinch, followed by tense hands and a glare that, when Amelia looked long enough, was more annoyed than angry. "Really?"
"Next one goes-"
"Amelia, cut the shit," In the next second, his hand was around her wrist and lifting her arm up so that the gun pointed far over his head, leaving her free to shoot again if she didn't mind firing into the sky. Amelia glared, realizing she'd been wrong to think she was faster than he was-
-and wrong to think he couldn't take that gun away from her if he tried-
-and suddenly remembering that warning shots were for people who weren't prepared to shoot to kill. If she had any real resolve to kill him then and there, she'd have done it, and he knew that.
"Look, I need you right now, okay-"
Under other circumstances, she might've thought about his words long enough to consider how hard they must have been to say. She wasn't expecting them. That didn't mean she wasn't prepared to dismiss them. "-that's a shame-"
He cut her off "-this ain't the time to fuck around. Okay, I was an asshole before," he scowled, and Amelia understood why. They were pressed for time. She still didn't drop the gun. "But you know I was just trying to loosen you up. You've obviously spilled some blood before. I thought-"
He stopped, and her thoughts wandered to the sniper's nest – making her decide, again, that something in the last three days had broken her brain – and she wondered what the sniper might've thought of them. She doubted they'd ever started shooting at a pair of strangers only to have them open fire on each other in response.
Then again, they'd likely never come across someone like Nate before. She hadn't.
He seemed hesitant, and it made her arch an eyebrow. "Look, I like to fuck around. I do. But we're in a-" He made a quick glance to the shooter. "-fuckin' pickle here and I'm telling you, we get through this, and…" Sincerity didn't look right on him. It was strange and foreign and Amelia was certain it was false, even as the four syllables of her full first name still echoed in her head.
"…and I'll work on that first impression you got of me, okay?"
He doesn't mean it, she hissed to herself. Why would he care about what she thought of him if he didn't care whether she lived or died? As far as she could tell, the only reliable thing about him was that her feelings toward him were mutual. They were strangers. Probably both killers. Definitely both with something to hide. Beginning and end of story.
His grip on her wrist loosened, giving her a chance to level the gun at his head, which she didn't take. "We're cool, right?" No answer. Just a furrowed glare the frustrated look of a girl fed up with her own hesitation. Do something, idiot. Make a choice. "Amy…we're cool?"
He stopped waiting for an answer he'd already guessed she wasn't going to give. "I'm gonna give you this gun back now…" He spoke as slowly as he moved, releasing her hand and half-turning – just far enough that he could still keep a wary eye on her – back to make his sprint across the parking lot. "And you're gonna shoot at that guy." He pointed over his shoulder, in the general direction of the diner. "That guy. Not me."
Finally, he turned. Took his eyes off of her completely and ran for cover on the other side of the parking lot. Leaving his life in her hands when she'd given him no reason to think she'd do anything other than leave him for dead. Or kill him herself.
He gave her the chance anyway.
"-have to keep-"
-chiming church bells low and loud hollow and deep ask not for-
"-pushing fluids or-"
radio static crackling white noise dead tone hello Amelia-
"-lose her to shock-"
-roaring water crashing waves an island full of familiar shapes and colors-
-warm water up to her waist-
-hot sand beneath her soles-
-waving and come join us and we missed you-
Amelia sprinted, as quickly as she could while hunched to keep her head down. She was caught between standing upright to move faster, and staying low but spending more time out in the open. Nate hadn't given her much time to think. He caught the gun mid-air and started shooting with barely a second in between, leaving Amelia to run now or risk him running out of bullets.
She regretted her choice.
She tried to pick up speed, looking up just enough to spot the far corner of the diner. The freight truck parked in the alley and the fence closing off the perimeter of the back area. She wasn't far-
-BANG-
-it was like someone had jammed a screwdriver into her shoulder and twisted, right in the soft spot where her arm connected to her body. The force was enough to knock her sideways onto the pavement, leaving her rolling onto her back and screaming at the sky, a hand pressed over the wound and blood gushing out between her fingers.
It happened fast. One second her entire reality was torn flesh and fractured bone and her heartbeat pounding in her ears and the next was her entire body being hauled across the pavement, half-lifted with an arm under one leg and half dragged by the collar of her sweatshirt for the last ten feet of open ground.
She didn't understand until she came to a stop in some hybrid of being dropped and being thrown. She landed on her wounded arm and screamed through clenched teeth as she rolled again, piecing together what had happened only after seeing him straighten up and dust off the front of his jacket. He walked past her – damn near stepped over her – lifting one bent arm to rotate the joint of his shoulder like he might have pulled something.
She hadn't had the time, hadn't recovered quickly enough to filter through the pain and find rational thought, to think clearly enough to move, get out, take cover. So Nate had done it for her.
She pushed herself up onto her knees – and knew immediately that she didn't want to stay like this – just long enough to move herself up against the building. She pressed her back to the brick wall of the diner and wondered, of all things, not what the hell but why the hell. She needed to understand despite the fact that it was over.
Repayment of a favor, maybe. Not for choosing not to shoot him, something she knew was far from a favor. But for staying.
No. That kind of gesture involved too much sentiment for him. That much she could already tell.
She told herself not to ask and did it anyway, out of breath and her nose sniffling like she'd been crying. Which she had, technically, but she maintained a rigid belief that bullet wounds didn't count. Not that she'd ever been shot before.
"Why did you do that?" It came out sounding accusatory, her tone pushed into harsh territory by throbbing pain and her impatience to make it go away.
He ignored her and kept walking. Didn't even look back.
She almost pushed it. She was sorely tempted to raise her voice and throw him a hey, I'm talking to you and maybe call him asshole again just out of habit. Instead she bit her lip and let her head fall back against the brick wall of the diner, and she said nothing while he looked over the fence leading to its back door. She wasn't demure or docile or even that kind anymore, but even she knew when to stop.
Stars were beginning to dot the night sky, she noticed as she stared upward. She hoped they'd distract her from the indignation and guilt having a head-on collision inside her chest. They didn't.
Don't say it don't say it just shut up-
"Thank you." She mumbled, just loudly enough that there was a chance he heard her, but it wasn't a sure thing. Either would have suited her. She glared at the ground between her feet, clutching her open shoulder and trying to hold the wound closed. It wasn't comfortable, showing gratitude and losing blood at the same time. Sitting on the ground with one useless arm while remembering she'd held him at gunpoint – fired off a fucking warning shot in his ear – and knowing he did what he did anyway. She needed something, anything to water down the sincerity. "Whatever." It was weak, and transparent, but it made her feel better.
He glanced back over his shoulder, just far enough to make her sure he'd heard.
She stopped counting minutes after the first three. She knew it didn't take that long to check out a fence. After another two ticked by, he came back to the brick wall. She felt the window of her grace period closing as he crouched in front of her and lowered his voice like either of them had something to be secretive about.
"Hey. Ames. You, uh, wanna get up?"
"Go away." Her voice was quiet, but she meant it.
"Gotta be honest. You're bein' a huge puss right now."
She flipped him the finger, one coated in blood.
She meant that, too. With every part of her being, she meant it. She knew he'd just rescued her, at great risk to himself. She knew he'd handled this situation better than she ever would have alone, and she knew people who seemed irredeemable weren't always that way, but she meant it. Fuck. You.
He grinned, and before she could see it coming and make any threats – she had one about breaking his fingers chambered and ready – he raised an arm and gave her a solid whack on her good shoulder. She felt it in the bad one.
"There she is." He stood and turned, apparently not about to wait for her to take her time getting up. "Come on. We got more work to do."
I shouldn't have come with you.
It's too fucking late now.
She watched him leave, headed for the fence and prepared to jump it. She could follow him or walk back out into the line of fire.
She regretted her choice, and would regret her next one just as much.
She stared straight up. Cold, dull metal was both beneath her body and far above it. She could hear voices, every one of them familiar.
The lighting was dull – or maybe it was just her colors draining again – and occasionally the entire room would lurch. Jar forward or to one side. After a while she realized the floor was rumbling beneath her.
One voice came through, distant and from the bottom of a metal trash can. Not directed at her but one she could hear all the same because, as usual, it was far louder than the rest.
"…get out of here…idea how fucked we are…"
She'd missed him while she was gone, she thought.
She remembered she hadn't gone anywhere. Not really.
She was laid out on a dinner table. Feet braced against the overstuffed and artificial red vinyl of the booth on either side of it. A pair of needle-nosed pliers an inch and a half inside her shoulder, and pushing deeper by a single centimeter at a time.
Her eyes stung. She was sure they were bloodshot red - some combination of tears running out and sweat running in – while she gritted her teeth and breathed unevenly. She clenched her fists, and when that didn't work, she flexed her fingers like rigid claws, grasping at nothing but ready to crush the first thing unfortunate enough to wander into her grip.
Nate had assured her he knew how to do this. Or at least that he'd done it before. Not that either was reassuring. She'd given him the pliers, hesitant to put them in his hands and reconsidering whether she'd be better off self-operating. He stopped to hold it in the flame of a lighter for a ten-count, gotta sterilize it first, Amy, don't be an idiot-
-God forbid she catch some kind of raging infection, maybe one that knocks her unconscious for a day and forces her to vomit tar when she woke-
She could swear she felt it scraping against bone. Chipping pieces off like enamel from a broken tooth, each one buried in her deltoid like shrapnel.
She was going to kill him. Never mind that he'd helped her and was helping her, that was a distant memory compared to searing pain that was as perpetual as it was unbearable. Excruciating. Infuriating. If she had to listen to him mumble to himself about almost got it and slippery fucker isn't it for one more fucking second she was going to rip the tool from his hands and plant it in his chest.
"Are you-"
Nate ripped the pliers out without warning and her scream buried her words.
"Gotcha!"
The rest of her threat disappeared, escaping her airway in a shaking sigh. She laid her head down flat, breathing deeply and appreciating that the pain was now dull and slow rather than immediate and vindictive. Her arm was numb below the elbow. She wasn't sure whether to call it a good or a bad thing.
Nate turned the pliers over, squeezing a single bronze bullet – blunted at the tip – between its points. Amelia watched from the table, trying to read his thoughts knowing that it was a game she couldn't win, not because it had too many rules but because it had none. Unwinnable to anyone who didn't think like he did.
He held the pliers out to her, as red and slick with her blood as the round crushed in their grip. "Souvenir?"
She expected a smile, a preemptive snort at his own joke. He only looked at her with a straight face. The raised eyebrows of someone who'd just asked a genuine question. She blinked slowly, drained literally and metaphorically and for once, at a loss for anything to say other than undiplomatic honesty. "What's wrong with you?"
If he thought she was talking about the two fresh corpses in the room – and she was – he didn't show it. He took it to mean what it sounded like she meant, shrugged at the bullet in his hands and flung it across the room, launching it from the pliers' grip like he was skipping a stone across the surface of a pond. It bounced along the linoleum and rolled to a stop in the far corner.
Not far from where he'd piled the bodies.
An old couple. Probably married for longer than Amelia had been alive. Still dressed like someone's grandparents; in four months of chaos they still hadn't thrown out the floral tops and sweaters and khaki for more practical clothes, like most everyone else. They weren't any kind of threat, once the rifle was confiscated. Not to people like her and Nate.
He'd shot them both in the neck anyway. Then in the head, to keep them from coming back.
"Relax, Amy." He'd said. The cracking of gunfire still thrummed in her ears, not at all like the shots that had been aimed at two of them. Not even like the one that nailed her in the arm. The smell of gunpowder lighting up still burned in her nose and clung there like something morbid and disgusting. Like seared rubber or burning flesh. "The shit part's over. Things are gonna be A-okay."
The blood was starting to pool beneath them.
It's too fucking late now.
She could have moved faster. Could have snatched the gun from his hands, knocked it away. Anything would have been better than nothing. But she'd done just that – nothing – because she didn't think he'd do it. Not that quickly, not that easily. Even after he suggested in a tone identical to the one he'd used to suggest pulling over to look for gas and supplies. Like there was no difference between what they'd come here to do and what they did.
It didn't take him long to leave the dining area, telling her something about checking out all their new supplies. She was up from the table the moment the swinging door shut behind him, reaching for whatever she could grab on the way out like the building was burning. She managed to shoulder a backpack she didn't bother to open – she had no idea what was inside but hoped for something useful – and a red gasoline canister that, she found when she picked it up, was half-full. Every move was as quiet as she could make it, but she reached a point where she found speed more compelling than silence and ran straight for the front doors, whispering her goodbyes and good riddances under her breath.
She hoped Nate had forgotten he'd left the keys in the ignition.
Either way, she knew he'd remember when he heard the engine turn over. She peeled out of the parking lot and onto the straight stretch of empty road. She wondered if he was watching from the window as she did. She didn't look back, but a part of her knew the answer.