Chapter 31
The sky is such a beautiful bright blue that it is almost painful to look at. It hurts Erin's heart more than it hurts her eyes as she stares through the windshield of the van. It was an absolutely gorgeous morning; clear blue sky, surprisingly little humidity and the perfect touch of a breeze as they buried their friends in a peaceful yard behind the small church. But the blue sky seemed out of place, the gentle breezes felt cold rather than refreshing and the air should have held more moisture to match all the tears that were shed for the three people who were laid to rest.
This is not the setting for a funeral, Erin thinks in an oddly dazed frame of mind. This is one of those rare perfect days that was meant to be enjoyed among friends.
She could accept the fact, finally, that her friends had decided to go their own way, but she could not comprehend the truth that they were all dead. Not on a day like this. The vibrant blue sky gives it that much more of a surreal feeling.
But maybe they didn't all die here today. After searching extensively, they never did find Amy. She wants to believe in Daryl's theory that her friend had walked up the street and found a car. That she drove away from this place with a beating heart and a will to live. And if there is a merciful God, they will run into her somewhere on their way to Savannah.
Rick climbs into the driver's seat and closes the door with a heavy thud, putting the final exclamation point on a wretched morning. He looks at her with red swollen eyes and she wishes she had the energy to reach out to him with a comforting hand. But she has sunken into a miasma of numbness and can barely manage to lift the corner of her mouth in a gesture of support.
It most likely comes off as a sad little smirk because he reaches for her hand and brings it to his mouth, comforting her instead. She finally gives him the warm, if tearful, smile that he deserves and squeezes his hand tightly. The look he shines back at her is still full of sorrow, but there is a strong glimmer of hope there as well.
Without saying a word, his eyes tell her, We are going to get through this.
Together, she answers silently back with a short nod and tender smile.
He releases her hand to shift into drive and she turns in her seat to check on Carl. He is curled into Kelly's side with his eyes closed over his tear-stained cheeks, Rick's hat clutched to his chest. The steadiness of his breathing tells her that he has fallen asleep. Not surprising after the emotional upheaval of the last two hours.
Erin gives Kelly a friendly caress on her knee and then looks to the third bench seat to check on Carol, in a similar position with Sophia sleeping against her. Carol returns her sympathetic smile before Erin turns to face forward again as the vehicle begins to move.
The ride is quiet, other than the frequent sniffles. Though they have subsided to an occasional snuff, everyone remains lost in their own melancholy thoughts as the Georgia countryside rushes by like a silent film playing on a movie screen. For forty minutes, as the children sleep, Erin listens to the rhythmic hum of the tires on the roadway and the whisper of the wind rushing over the bumper and up the windshield, the soundtrack to the movie playing just outside her window. She wishes the monotonous tone and soothing ride would rock her to sleep as well, just to escape for a little while. But then, after passing arbitrary billboards advertising random businesses that don't exist anymore, she sees a sign for Emory University and happy memories come flooding in to briefly extinguish the sadness in her soul.
Thinking of her days in the nursing program, she can practically smell the biology lab with its distinctive aroma of iodine and old plastic, the somewhat almond-vanilla odor of the textbooks in the library, the grease of the Chick-Fil-A in Cox Hall, the flowery scent of her roommates perfume as they got ready to go to a party, and the coffee maker working overtime to help them cram for an exam that they were desperate not to fail.
God, things were so much simpler then – when she was just fighting cancer while trying to earn a degree. She smirks inwardly and then imagines a younger Rick during his police academy days. She would have had such a crush on him that she would've failed all her exams, unable to concentrate on her studies for the daydreams he would have induced. She envisions him running around with Shane as rookies… with Shane... and then the present comes crashing back like an unforgiving tidal wave with an undertow that sweeps her off her feet and knocks her breath away.
She bites her lip to keep from groaning out loud. Her grief is painfully fresh as she recalls the moment she watched Dale and Glenn lay Jacqui in the ground. Her eyes begin to burn with unshed tears and she squeezes them shut and turns her face toward the window, hiding her sorrow from Rick. When she opens them again she sees a fuzzy image of a lone walker shuffling down the center of the street.
As they get closer, Erin notices the long blonde hair hanging down the walker's back and she chokes back a sob. "Oh my God."
"Shit!" Rick steps harder on the brake to stop the car instead of steering around the figure.
"Amy?" Kelly breathes sleepily from the back seat as Erin opens her door and jumps out of the van.
"Erin!" Rick yells, his voice alarmed and angry. A moment later he is yanking on her arm and standing before her, keeping her from getting too close to the blood-spattered woman who is turning slowly in their direction.
"Amy!" Erin cries, looking at the almost unrecognizable face of her friend.
"Jesus," Rick breathes, still gripping her arm tightly as he gapes at Amy.
Half of her face is a swollen distortion of a high cheekbone set in blotches of deep violet edged in gold. The other half is covered in dark scarlet from the large gash above her left eyebrow. Her head is tilted as if her neck is too tired to support it. Her lips are parted slightly, but less so on the right side of her mouth where the upper lip balloons out to almost double its original size.
The woman in front of Erin looks like a dreadful caricature of her friend. Her heart sinks as Rick releases her arm to reach for his knife. "Amy…," she sighs miserably as her throat closes on gut-wrenching emotion. Not again. Not Amy too!
The glimmer of hope she'd held out for Amy vanishes in the flash of the sun reflecting off steel as Rick raises his knife. The pounding in her ears drowns out the sound of car doors opening and closing behind them.
The woman returns Erin's gaze with light turquoise eyes that shine with hazy recognition. The sadness and confusion swimming in their depths is unsettling. She expected to see less humanity and more guttural instinct in the eyes of a walker. Less… life. Life! "Oh, God." Her heart leaps and skids to a halt in the same breath. "Rick!"
But he'd seen it too, thank God - that tiny spark of life in Amy's eyes, just bright enough to keep her this side of heaven. "Amy!" he gasps and Erin can hear the panic in his voice, realizing just how close he had come - not to putting down a walker, but to actually killing the young woman.
She is looking at Rick but doesn't seem to see him standing before her. "Amy?" Erin says gently as she takes a cautious step forward and slowly reaches out to her friend. "It's going to be okay now," she tells her softly as Dale and Michonne join Kelly and Carol to form a small gathering behind her and Rick. "We're here now, Amy."
Amy lifts her head at the sound of Erin's voice but continues to look at Rick, her eyes more focused but still somewhat detached. The pale gray skin of her forehead is covered with a sheen of sweat above the gash encrusted with dried blood. Her sleepy eyelids open and close over dilated pupils as she breathes quick shallow breaths. "She's in shock," Erin says, recognizing the classic symptoms from her years working at a busy hospital.
"Let's get you to the camper so you can lie down, sweetheart," Rick says in a tender tone, soothing enough to coax a rabbit out of its burrow.
"I saw a deer," Amy says, her voice a raspy mumble of words forced through a dehydrated throat.
"What, honey?" Rick asks, just before throwing his arms out to catch Amy from hitting the ground in a dead faint.
As fields and forests rush past in a blur outside his window, Rick glances to his right as his sister stirs in the front passenger seat, mumbling some random statement in her sleep, just like when they were kids. He gives her an affectionate smile and glances in the rearview mirror to check on his son.
Strapped into the middle row next to Sophia, his head is slumped in slumber with the large sheriff's hat covering most of his face. Alternating glances between the road ahead and his passengers behind, the mirror shows him that Sophia and her mom are also asleep while Michonne, sitting next to Carol in the third row, blinks slowly in an effort to keep her eyes open.
He doesn't know if it's the illness putting her to sleep now or the soothing sway and rumble of the car ride, but she did seem to be quite a bit better today. He was surprised, and extremely impressed, when she'd emerged from the camper to keep watch for them during the funeral process.
She had climbed to the top of the camper, slow but sure-footed to take over for Dale. And though she was still pretty weak, her stance was that of a person who knew how to take care of herself. Besides the fact that she seemed comfortable and capable with the katana, he could see something in her eyes, beneath the sheen of her ailment. She was going to be an asset to their group. He was glad he had found her.
She'd impressed him even more when she'd insisted that Amy take the bed in the camper when they'd continued on their journey. She'd said she was feeling well enough and even took a stab at humor saying that Dale's bed was too comfortable for her liking after sleeping on the ground for weeks.
Glancing in the side-view mirror to see the camper following behind him, he wonders for the hundredth time if Erin is having trouble keeping Amy awake.
They'd agreed that it would be wise to keep her up in case she had a concussion. But a concussion was the least of his worries.
Though he'd checked Amy for bite marks before carrying her into the camper, he still wasn't completely comfortable leaving her alone with Erin. What if he'd missed something? An inconspicuous scratch. A small bite hidden beneath a shadow of her clothing.
Erin had assured him that her wounds were not fatal, but what if she missed something herself? What if Amy died in the back of that camper… and turned?
He'd never actually seen someone transform from dead to undead - until Jacqui.
And it had scared the shit out of him.
One moment she'd been lying quiet in death and utterly still, and then suddenly she was moving again like she'd changed her mind about leaving this world.
He'd nearly thrown the shovel as he'd jumped back from her half-dug grave. Thank God Daryl had reacted quick enough to put her down. And thank Erin's baby Jesus that she and Kelly and Carol had taken the kids to pick some flowers to put on the graves. They did not need to remember their friend that way.
And they did not need to worry about already being infected themselves.
When he and the other men had resumed their digging, Morgan made a point to check Jacqui's body for bite wounds. Lost in his own heartbreaking thoughts, Rick hadn't paid much attention to his friend until the man had stood up and announced that Jacqui hadn't been bit.
"You must have missed it," he told Morgan. "Why would she turn if she wasn't bitten or scratched?"
"The only wounds she has are from the accident, Rick. And we know she wasn't attacked after we pulled her from the car."
"That doesn't make sense," Glenn said, his shovel suspended with a small mound of dirt on its blade.
"You're saying that she got the virus without even being attacked by a walker?" Rick said, disbelief etched along his raised eyebrows. "Like it was already inside her, Morgan?"
"How did she get the virus inside her?" T-Dog asked, stepping out of a deep grave and clearly alarmed.
"It's inside all of us, isn't it?" Dale added, eyes wide and worried below his own thick brows. "Waiting for us to die just to restart our motor skills again?"
Rick turned toward the small field at the side of the church to make sure his family was okay, and out of earshot. Seeing Erin and Carol carrying handfuls of pretty colors as Kelly and the kids crouched to pull more flowers from the ground, he took a steadying breath and returned his focus to Morgan, but adjusted his position to keep one eye on their field.
"Whatever this thing is," Morgan began, "We know it isn't airborne, jumping from one person to another. It can only be transferred by bites or deep scratches. But the way it spread so incredibly fast across the world, you'd have to believe that the air itself or the water supply had to be contaminated."
"Which means we all carry the virus." Merle said dispassionately, his voice a dull pragmatic slap on the wind as he joined them from his nap in the truck. "Wonderful. There's a chance I may get to die this week after all," he added dryly.
Turning to address the group at large, Rick said in a hushed tone, "Don't say anything about this to the girls. We don't know for sure and we don't need to scare them any worse than they already are."
Now he just prays that Erin won't need to use the gun that he had insisted she carry. Maybe he should have told her the truth – or the truth of what they suspect anyway. But he really did find it hard to believe that they all carried the virus. Regardless, he was not going to leave her defenseless. He was adamant that she take the gun just in case. She didn't need to know every reason for his concern.
And he really didn't think that Amy was going to start burning up with fever. If he had, he would never have left Erin in the camper – no matter how much his Scottish lover would have argued.
When Amy had woken up as he was laying her on the bed, she seemed fairly alert when she'd assured him that she had not been bitten. But she had been listless and loopy for who knows how long before they'd found her and he didn't believe she could know for sure. If he hadn't checked her thoroughly himself, and found nothing but a medley of scrapes and bruises on her upper body from the crash, he'd never have let Erin near the young woman.
But he'd stood quietly in the doorway, listening intently while Erin did her job, treating her patient with a slew of antiseptic wipes, a couple of ice packs and a butterfly bandage while Amy slowly, numbly told them what had happened.
The deer had come out of nowhere, clipping the front fender and forcing the van to flip over. When she said that Shane had gotten bit when he was pulling her out of the wreck, saving her life, Rick had to fight to keep the tears from forming again as he'd envisioned the scene - and recalling the moment he'd discovered his best friend hunched over the deer.
Now, glancing once again at the reflection of the camper in the side-view mirror, the fact that Erin has the gun is only a small comfort, knowing exactly how difficult it is to actually use it on someone you cared about.
Shane's dark eyes haunt him as the barren landscape changes to a smattering of farms followed by a spread of neighborhoods which lead into a conglomerate of local businesses, creating another small town in central Georgia. A town that Shane would never see.
A fusion of sadness and futility settles in his bones with a melancholy that he hadn't felt since the day his father left him.
As he draws closer to the town, frustration rises again as he moves his foot from the gas to the brake. After hours spent maneuvering around jammed intersections, almost losing the camper in a league of mud, and then being forced to backtrack eighteen miles north to head west due to an infestation of walkers blocking a narrow bridge, he sees another traffic snarl up ahead and his heart sinks just a little bit more.