Chapter Twenty Eight
The light rain falls with a heartbeat of its own, weeping for them all on this miserable muggy morning. It is not a cleansing rain but a sad woeful drip that envelopes their despair. The trees sway gently in a dance of mournful pity as the dark gray clouds drift across the sky, their stride of indifference casting a slim ray of scorn. The air itself is feeding off their sorrow, thickening with every passing teardrop that streams down Erin's face.
She mourns for the sister that is left behind, for the group of survivors that is now irrevocably torn apart, and for the sense of security which is now completely unattainable in the harsh reality of this ravaged world.
With most of the group already returned to camp, it is a small procession that she follows out of the tidy peaceful meadow where they'd laid Amy's sister to rest, to sleep beneath the tall trees and pretty flowers. Dale, who had given a beautiful eulogy during the short sentimental service to memorialize the life of Andrea Harrison, had picked the spot near a particularly robust red maple tree, saying that it would warm her in the cold winter months and shade her on long summer days. Erin loved that about Dale. He was clever and kind and he knew how to make the best of a bad thing in his own practical way.
With her hand warming in Rick's, she hears another sniffle from Carol as she and Kelly lead a despondent Amy down the path toward the campsite. Her tears are more likely for her friends than for her late husband, whose body they'd left for the earth to claim in the place where he'd taken his last cruel breath. Carol did not want to honor him with a burial and nobody felt the need to argue with her decision, agreeing to 'Let him rot with the rest of the monsters.'
Though her heart is heavy with grief for a friend, Carol seems to be walking with a certain buoyancy in her stride, a newfound easiness which favors that of a frightened bird that has suddenly discovered its wings.
As Carol wipes a hand across her cheek, Erin hears Kelly say, "You can ride in our car tomorrow, Amy. You can hang out in the back of the van with me and Carl. We'll let Erin sit up front with Rick so they can be close to each other. God knows they'll stop breathing if they go more than ten minutes without touching each other," she says dramatically and Erin catches the corner of her teasing eye-roll.
Rick tugs on Erin's hand as Kelly's words help to ease the sadness weighing on their hearts. She smiles up into his beautiful eyes, squeezing his fingers in return.
"I can't go with you, Kelly," Amy murmurs sadly.
"What?" Kelly replies. "What are you talking about? Of course you can come with us. There's plenty of room."
"I can't," Amy repeats. "Andrea wanted me to go with Shane. So I'm going to Fort Benning. I have to," she adds, her tone empty, completely void of emotion.
"No, Amy. You don't have to," Kelly insists, bringing the procession to a halt as she stops in the middle of the path to face the distraught woman.
"I do, Kelly," she responds with a heavy sigh that bears the weight of tremendous guilt as it deflates her shoulders.
Erin sees the sorrow in her friend's eyes cloud over with an even more dangerous emotion; the acceptance of defeat. No! Releasing Rick's hand, she clutches Amy's forearm, unaware that she'd even stepped forward to do so. "Amy, don't do this. You can't give up!"
"Just because I'm going with Shane doesn't mean I'm giving up."
"The hell it doesn't!" Erin exclaims, frustration and terror sharpening her tongue.
"Hey, Red." Rick's soft voice and soothing touch against her lower back pulls her attention from the forlorn look on Amy's face. "You're not helping her, honey."
"So we're just going to let her walk off into the sunset with Shane, knowing that she'll welcome the death that will bring her back to her sister?!"
"Easy now!" Rick pulls her round to face him, gripping her upper arms as he steps between her and Amy. She shrugs defensively and tries to pull away but his fingers refuse to let her go.
"I have to go, Erin!" Amy says miserably, now standing in the circle of Carol's arms.
Erin isn't aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, nor those of the three women at Rick's back. She barely registers the fingers digging into her arms. "Look at her face, Rick, and tell me she isn't quitting!"
"Enough! She's dealing with a lot of shit right now, Red, and you've got to let her figure it out." He lifts his hands to her cheeks and rubs his thumbs through her tears. "Screaming at her is not the way, baby. You know that," he adds softly.
The tenderness in his expression is more powerful than the fingers that were digging into her flesh. Swallowing with a hiccup, she shakes her head sadly as the soft drizzle strengthens into a light rain. "We can't let her go, Rick."
"I don't know what else to do, Erin!" Amy cries. "What am I supposed to do?" The rhetorical question is punctuated with a wretched sob.
"You fight! And you keep on fighting!" Erin yells around Rick's shoulder, wiping moisture from her face that is a mixture of tears and rainwater.
A sudden crack and rumble of thunder promises to release a storm that will shake the camp, summing up Andrea's final day in a tumultuous world, and the aftermath that it has created.
"Please, Amy." Carol says through her own tears. "Please come with us."
"Don't give up yet, Amy," Erin cries. "Please," she adds more gently as Rick loosens his grip and she steps around him.
"Listen, Amy," Rick says with all the compassion that Erin had lost beneath the fear of losing her friend. "Just think about it, okay? You were ready to come with us from the start. You felt strongly enough to argue with Andrea about it," he says gently, hesitating for just a moment on her sister's name as if forcing the syllables from his throat was physically painful. "I know you want to honor your sister, but you've got to believe that she would want you to be happy, to go on living without her… to survive." Erin loves him for the way he underscored that final word. It's the one thing programmed into our DNA that overpowers all other human nature; the basic instinct to preserve oneself. She prays that her friend finds it before it is swallowed up completely by her shattered heart. "And if you want to survive, you've got to come with us," Rick adds as the wind picks up and the rain comes down.
"You know he's right, Amy," Kelly says, brushing her soggy bangs out of her eyes. "Please listen to him."
"I can't," she cries, turning away from their desperate pleas. "I have to go." Her voice breaks on the last word as she flees up the dirt path, stumbling on a protruding rock or root but catching herself to continue her race back to her tent, and the numbness of her despair.
With misery her constant companion, Amy is still in the tent and hour later when Erin watches Rick drive away with Daryl and Glenn on a search for gasoline and food, the main ingredients for their survival. She promised him that she would give Amy space to figure things out on her own, but she can't stop glancing across the camp to the tent where her friend is wallowing in agonizing sorrow and debilitating guilt.
Jacqui steps out occasionally, carrying bags and small plastic totes to the Pelletier's van, which Carol had insisted they take on their journey south.
Erin desperately wants to say something to her, but fears it would only upset them both. So each time they cross paths in their efforts of packing up their belongings, she has kept her eyes on the ground at her feet as Jacqui focuses on her own stretch of grass.
The day passes in this fashion, like two separate meals going on at one dinner table. The lines are clearly drawn with nobody crossing sides. Not even Amy who finally emerges at dinner, but sits between Shane and Jim and Jacqui across their last quarry campfire, which feels like a vast battlefield tonight.
After thirty minutes of softly spoken questions and murmured replies on one side of the fire or the other, Shane stands to address his troop. "We should turn in soon. I want to get on the road just before dawn. That means we're up before the birds, so…"
Erin watches Rick shoot to his feet from the chair next to her.
"Shane." Rick tilts his head, a final questioning plea unspoken on his tongue. His partner meets his gaze as everyone rises from their seats, watching the two men, waiting in wide-eyed silence.
After several tension-filled heartbeats, Shane shakes his head gently and then nods, his lip curling into a sincere smile. "Good luck in Savannah, man."
Rick meets his friend in two long strides and pulls Shane's outstretched hand into a hug worthy of blood brothers. Erin catches the shimmer of their eyes in the firelight and then she is being enveloped by Jacqui's dark sinewy arms. Strangled by emotion, no words are spoken as they convey their feelings with the hands clinging to one another.
Through the starless black sky, the soft rain kisses the trees and drizzles on the roof of the tent in a soothing patter. Erin can barely see his outline, but she can feel every inch of Rick beneath and inside of her. The pungent aroma of their coupling floats heavy on the air inside the tent as she relaxes into him, melting against his body. Limbs that were tense with carnal indulgence are now loose and limber as her heart begins to calm and her legs tingle with aftershocks.
They had held onto each other in grief and clung to one another in fear, and then, with the notion of tomorrow's journey hanging over their heads with its unknown possibilities and probable misfortunes, they tore at each other with an urgency borne on desperation.
With her forehead against his jaw, the soft hairs curling across his chest tickle her chin as she feels his heart beating profoundly beneath her ear. His left hand rests on the slope of her ass while the other glides affectionately up and down along her spine. She lightly traces a square around the bandage covering the healing wound above his heart as the tingling in her legs recedes. He invigorates and terrifies her all in a single breath. "God, what you do to me, Rick," she murmurs.
"Yeah, sweetheart. I know the feeling," he replies, breathing heavily. "It's like I can't get enough of you. I'll never get enough of you."
That too, she thinks. "It's like we have to make up for all the time we weren't together."
"Yeah. I get it now. Everything I've done in the last three years has led me straight to you. I'm sorry it took me so long to figure it out."
"I knew you'd catch up to me eventually." She smiles sleepily into his chest as he softens inside of her.
"You did, didn't you," he says with a deep breath as his arms tighten around her back.
"Always." From the moment their eyes had connected and held after he'd watched her undress in the tent that first night, and looking back at every dream they'd shared – especially his sexy dreams that she had only slightly felt on a kind of subliminal level, and never admitted to knowing about for fear of scaring him away from her tent – she had always known that he was hers and she was his, in every sense that truly mattered. She believes that they would have found each other even if he hadn't been searching for his family after the world had ended.
They would have met in the hospital when he woke from his coma one busy afternoon before the end of her shift. Or they would have run into each other at the grocery and struck up a conversation on an early Saturday morning. No doubt in her mind that she would have been drawn to him as strongly as she's been for the past month; like oxygen to a flame - unable to survive without the life he breathes into her. "Rick?" she asks softly and waits, wondering if he is still awake.
"Hmm?"
His reply is low but he is still conscious so she continues. "How long will it take us to get to Savannah?"
He sighs deeply and then speaks with a tired but clear voice. "Hard to say. Two months ago it would've been four or five hours, depending on the Atlanta traffic. On the backroads now, it could take us four or five days. More if we hit a lot of roadblocks.
"We're not all going to make it, are we?" she asks softly. He doesn't say anything and the silence stretches between them. Just when she thinks he may have fallen asleep, she feels his chest rise with the whisper of his words against her hair.
"I promise you, Erin, you will make it to Savannah. And so will Carl and Kelly."
"And you too, Rick. Right?" she says, suddenly wide awake with a lump tightening her throat and a knot in her belly as her flutter doubles over in fear.
"Definitely," he says without hesitation. "I will be there to keep you safe. I promise."
"I love you." Her eyes sting with profound emotion for the magnitude of what this man means to her.
"I love you back, Red. Always."
She listens to his heart beating beneath her ear for a few long moments, gaining strength from its sturdy presence as the arms at her back loosen with the prospect of sleep. A slice of stubbornness twists the corner of her mouth into a slight frown. "Well if we're not all going to make it, I'll gladly give up Merle," she murmurs in defiance to fate.
"What?" His chest vibrates with laughter beneath her. "I can't believe you just said that," he says, still chuckling as his arms tighten against her back once again.
"I know, that's awful." She turns her cheek to bury her face in his chest. "God forgive me."
"I don't think Daryl would be happy about that."
"No he wouldn't," she says somberly, returning her ear to his chest. "But I still think you need to watch your back around him. He'll never forgive you for taking his hand. Even if it did save his life."
"Yeah, I know. But you've got to stop worrying about that. I can handle him," Rick replies with a confidence that does little to ease her fears. "He's the least of our problems right now."
"Yeah, but if I start thinking about the two hundred and fifty miles we have to cross to get to Savannah, I'll never fall asleep."
"So think of something else. Something positive," he says, dragging his knuckles along her ribs just hard enough to keep her ticklish skin from squirming.
"Like how wonderful the world is now without any obnoxious cops pulling you over for going a wee bit over the speed limit?" she teases.
"I'll have you know that I was never obnoxious when I pulled over a speed demon such as yourself."
"You didn't lose your southern charm as you were writing up those tickets?"
"Only with the stuck up northerners that always seemed to be in a hurry," he teases, lightly tapping her rear.
"Jeez, if I'd ever gotten the privilege of being pulled over by you, you'd have had me in handcuffs for resisting arrest."
"Ooh, thanks for that image."
She smiles, enjoying the vision herself as she thinks of the uniform folded neatly on the cot a few feet away. "You probably would have frisked me or something too, right?"
"Well you would've forced me to. You know, resisting arrest and all."
"And I'm sure you would've been quite thorough."
"Of course. I was very good at my job," he says and she can hear the smile in his voice in the dark.
"Mmm, I'm sure you were." She lifts her cheek slightly to kiss his jaw.
"You would have broken more speed limits in a rush to get home to your vibrator," he says with a laugh that is full of male cockiness.
She laughs along with him, adoring his flirty remarks. But she'll never give up an opportunity to tease Rick mercilessly. "Aww, don't remind me. I miss him so much!" She chuckles deep in her throat as he grips the back of her neck.
"Hey! You don't need that thing anymore."
"Says who?" she goads as he squeezes her nape.
"Says me. I got your toy right here, baby." He moves his hips and she feels him stir inside of her. Even at half-mast, he is still quite large and pretty impressive, tucked steadfast and sturdy within her.
She lifts her head to look at his face in the shadows. Though she can barely see the circles of his eyes, she knows they are dancing in a spirited blaze of blue. Resting her chin on her fist, she feels the warm exhale of his breath ghosting against her lips. "Yeah, but what good are you when your batteries run out?"
"Who needs batteries?" He shifts beneath her, driving his groin up into hers and she feels him thicken slightly.
"Ummm…" she hums, tilting her head as if deep in thought and searching for the answer to a riddle. She smiles as she can practically hear his brows drawing together in concentration. "This better be worth the wait, sheriff," she teases.
"Oh it will be," he says, tightening his arms around her back and flipping them over without breaking their connection.
She strokes the back of his neck as he lies heavy upon her, gradually stiffening within her. Bridging their minds as well as their bodies, he rests his forehead against hers as he rotates his hips, slowly driving his cock in and out of her tender flesh. The slick friction brings him to life once again and it isn't long before she is clawing at his shoulders as her flutter moans low in her belly.
Leaning back to shift into full throttle, he slips an arm behind each of her knees and raises her legs to an exquisite angle. The heightened pressure on her sex builds and blossoms as he plunges deeper and deeper into her quaking body.
With her entire universe narrowed down to the radiant fluttering at the crux of their union, she forgets the existence of batteries as one singular thought dances through her mind; Yes!