Chapter 30
"Shane!" Rick yells, following Daryl through the long grass and blinking rapidly to clear the moisture in his eyes. He coughs and swallows hard, again and again, but cannot dislodge the knob that has settled thick in his throat. "Amy! Shane!" he hollers, echoing the calls from T-Dog down the street as Daryl stops to inspect the ground for another trace of their friends.
The van had been surrounded by spattered drips and small pools of dark congealed blood, hardening in the sun among the broken bits of metal and glass, along with a couple of badly deteriorated walkers lying about the wreckage.
They'd followed a thin trail of blood away from the wreck, sixty yards of a zigzagged staggering path along the asphalt, until it faded to nearly nothing before turning into a vast meadow at the side of the road.
Rick almost loses his footing on the dew-drenched grass as the uneven ground spreads across a sea of ruts and rises. With a grief-stricken heart and a paralyzing fear for the man he'd considered his brother, he stumbles and then catches himself, forcing his body upright to cast his voice a great distance, hoping that his friend will hear it. "Shaaane!"
From the moment they had come upon the wreck, and the heart-wrenching sight of Jim, battered and bloody and staggering around the upturned van in a grotesquely unnatural state, Rick refused to believe that Shane had met the same fate.
Even as he had withdrawn his knife from the bearded man's temple, his eyes blurry with tears and his hands shaking in sorrow, he couldn't imagine Shane lurching around with nothing but muscle memory to move his loose limbs, reaching out for any warm-blooded being in his path. No. He had to be alive. His mind would still be sharp and his eyes would continue to wander, constantly searching for a pretty face. His hands would be itching for a buxom body to hold and his mouth pursed with desire, not snarling with an animalistic hunger to tear into the flesh of an unfortunate victim.
"Amy!" Rick yells, glancing toward a strand of trees to the right of the field. With vivid clarity, he recalls the devastating image of Jacqui - sweet soulful Jacqui - lying in a crumpled heap on the inverted ceiling inside the van. The severely broken fingers on the hand lying next to her sickly twisted neck had reminded him of gnarled branches on a dying tree. Looking across the grass to peer between the thick trunks of birch, beech and hemlocks, his eyes frantically scan the grove as his heart pounds furiously inside his chest. "Shane!"
"Shit, I lost it!"
Rick turns back toward Daryl, now studying a wider circle than the small patch of earth he had been examining a moment before. "Keep looking. There's gotta be something there," he says, refusing to give up. "They didn't just disappear."
"Unless Glenn and Morgan find somethin' in that sorry excuse for a town back there, I'm tellin' ya, Rick, they're gone."
"Well they can't have gone far, then. They're hurt. Maybe they got into a car and drove off."
"Maybe one of them did, but not both," Daryl says, shaking his head sadly. "There was only one trail of blood."
"Let's go back, search for another trail. All that blood, there's gotta be something else," Rick says, frustrated and frightened. "We just have to find it!"
Returning to the scene of the accident, Rick glances at Dale standing on the roof of the camper and then meets Erin's tearful questioning eyes through the windshield of the van. He shakes his head slowly, a sad negative answer to a question he'd never wanted to be asked. He sees his sister and Carol huddled with the kids in the seat behind her, their faces a shadowed tapestry of mourning. He holds up a hand to Erin, his palm telling her to stay put. She nods in pitiful misery as she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and he looks away quickly, before her grief can merge with his and render him useless, dragging him to drown under the weight of it.
The sun heats his back as he crouches to inspect a dried puddle of blood at the foot of a walker. An early walker from the look of its emaciated form beneath the shredded clothing – an outfit of indistinct colors that tells the story of weeks spent scratching out a monstrous existence. The dirty brown ruddiness that disguises the true hues of the garments seems to match the state of his heart and all he can see is despair. He blinks hard to clear the dangerous emotion as a buzzard's deep nasally whine resonates overhead.
"That blood didn't come from this guy," Daryl says as he kneels next to him.
"I know. More like he slipped in it and then got a knife in his ear." Rick points to the creature's head and to the trail of dark stickiness that leads from his ear to his jaw, where a family of flies buzzes about. "This was probably Jim's," he murmurs despondently. "His boot was covered in blood from that piece of metal in his leg. And it leads right to him," he adds softly, inhaling through his nose to catch the stream of snot that threatens to escape from his nostrils. "I just want to make sure we aren't missing something else."
The ugly buzzard whines again as it circles above them. Rick looks up and squints into the bright blue sky. The fleeting image of a bird in flight above a barn triggers a memory of another vision seen through squinting eyes. The church! He thinks of the pretty little church about a half mile back, across from the old dilapidated barn. It had stood quietly when they drove past, solemnly watching over the walker that was enjoying an unhealthy breakfast in its parking lot. "Oh my God."
With his heart beating in triple-time, Rick races toward T-Dog's jeep as Daryl yells at his back, hot on his heels. "What the hell, man! Where ya goin'?"
Skidding into the lot of the church a minute later, Rick's foot crushes the brake pedal as he peers through the dirty windshield at the walker feasting on a dead deer. The muscles beneath a familiar black tee shirt shift its broad shoulders at the sound of their arrival and a head of thick ebony hair rises slowly from its meal, attracted to the noise of the screeching tires.
It's only a brief moment of time, one beat of a breaking heart, but it stretches out interminably as Rick recognizes the face before it turns back to its meal; the face of the man he considered his brother. "No! Nooo! Ah no!" He punches the steering wheel, again and again, expelling a tempest of grief as tears stream freely down his cheeks.
With a furious grip on the wheel, he thrashes madly in his seat, enraged at the fate that had put his friend on this perilous path, and angry at himself for not trying harder to convince the man to follow him to Savannah.
When his anguish abates and he feels empty inside, he leans his head back on the headrest and closes his eyes, his hands lying bruised and hopeless in his lap. A minute - or an hour – later, he hears the deep click of a car door and opens his eyes to see Daryl stepping out of the jeep with his crossbow. "Daryl!"
"We can't leave him like that, Rick," Daryl says gently after Rick shifts into park and gets out of the driver's side of the jeep.
"No. We won't. But I'll do it," Rick replies miserably, his heart constricting in sorrow again after rising up from the debilitating numbness. "It's gotta be me." He swallows hard as he takes his gun from its holster, his hand shaking badly.
He walks on unsteady legs across the pavement, stopping about twenty feet from the deer. From Shane. Slowly lifting the Colt Python to aim it at the profile of his best friend, a stream of memories flickers before his eyes like an old movie reel, highlighting the story of two troublemaking boys that had grown into respectable men with a bond tighter than many blood brothers.
He can still hear the words of comfort Shane had said on the day his father walked out. He can still feel the warm solid hands that steadied him after his first dance with a bottle of vodka. He can still see the laughing brown eyes that dared him to talk to a pretty girl. And he can still smell the smoke of the cigar they had shared on the day that Carl was born.
You bastard. His veins burn hot again as the anger returns, clenching his jaw painfully hard. Why did you make me do this? I hate you. I love you. I'm sorry.
The gamut of emotions roils his belly and a wave of nausea threatens to unsettle his stomach as his eyes fill in agony.
He clears the tears with the back of his wrist and then looks down the barrel of the gun. When he sees Shane's dark head centered in the sight at the end of the barrel, his eyes well up again and he can't keep the tears from spilling out once more. He lowers his chin with a sob and shakes his head to clear the moisture that blurs his vision. "Son of a bitch!" he groans wretchedly as Daryl appears at his side.
"Just keep it steady, man. You got this."
Rick is grateful for the support and the compassion in Daryl's tone, but in the haze of grief, he numbly registers that the hunter is still holding onto the loaded crossbow. He inhales deeply and raises the Colt once more, refusing to lose the chance, the choice, to take care of Shane himself.
When he finally pulls the trigger, the sound of the single gunshot ricochets off the church steeple, carrying with it the soul of a beloved friend as it echoes through the crumbling walls of the dilapidated barn, leaps down the cracked asphalt of the sleepy two-lane road, sweeps through the long grasses of the peaceful meadow, and soars above the solitary fluff of cloud in the endless blue sky as it shatters Rick's heart into a million tiny little pieces.