Part Six
Jack Welker was standing in front of Merle and Daryl's house, with a gun in his hand and a fed-up look on his face.
Merle was staring right back at him.
"We had a deal, Jack Welker. Either you've got my money or you're getting the hell off my lawn, because I'm not a fan of this takesies-backsies bullshit."
"I decided," Jack replied, "I've got your money, and then some. You've just got to give us our rat back. I'll pay you for your trouble."
Jesse stood behind Daryl, nearly clinging to his leg with fright.
"He ain't coming back with you," Daryl declared. "He's with us now. He don't belong you to and actually, he never did."
"Merle? Tell your brother he needs to learn how to see sense. If he's going to take a stand, why bother to make it over this little pissant right here? He's just a rat anyway, but my Toddy took a liking to him and he wants him back. So I'm getting him back." Daryl turned to look at Jesse in horror.
Jesse was about to curl into a ball. He couldn't go back there. He would rather just stay here, rather stay here and die. Even if he didn't trust Daryl yet, and wasn't sure that he could ever trust anybody again, it was better here, where no one hurt him. Better here, where they fed him and seemed to want him for something other than working him until his hands bled and then killing him off when he got too convenient.
Maybe it had all been a trick. Maybe they had done this to play with him, to mock him and make him think he was out when he wasn't. Like a cat letting a mouse go, only to grab it back in its paws, let him go again, and then keep up the game until he was bored with it.
That seemed like them. That seemed like Jack especially.
Unbidden, Jesse whispered in Daryl's ear, "No… Don't."
"Don't worry," Daryl growled back, "You're not going anywhere."
Jesse didn't even know where Daryl grabbed the crossbow from. It was all so fast that his head was spinning, or maybe the time in the compound had done something to his brain. Maybe it had rotted it out; seawater had gotten in and everything had gone moldy. Time didn't make any sense anymore.
Only Daryl made sense; Jesse's eyes zeroed in on Daryl as he lifted the crossbow and pointed it straight at Jack.
"Don't make me," Daryl told him firmly. "I don't wanna, but I will if I hafta. I need him for plans of my own, so finders keepers you son of a bitch. Don't you come around here no more, don't you come around here ever again trying to kidnap him. It's a down dirty thing you did to him anyway."
"You're really pointing a crossbow at me? You don't have the…"
Jesse's head whipped around at the sound of the crossbow unleashing an arrow in Jack's direction. The older man let out a yowl and moved his hand to his arm. Jesse couldn't look. He could see blood spurting, pooling on the ground.
"No…" he muttered, but he didn't even know what he was saying "no" about. If Jack was dead, that meant an end to his problems, didn't it? But he still couldn't feel comfortable with death, with corpses lying around him. With barrels, with pink globs falling from his ceiling. "No, don't kill him…" Jesse didn't know why the words were coming out of his mouth. They weren't coming out very loudly, however. He was being drowned out by Jack's yells.
"Worry about that later!" he was raging at Kenny. "Get me the hell out of here! We'll deal with the rat and all of them later! I think my damn shoulder is about to fall off!"
Kenny looked from Jack to the holster on his hip and then back again. Daryl shifted his own shoulder, pointing the crossbow in Kenny's direction.
"You like one?" he inquired.
Kenny shook his head and put up his hand.
"No need to be like that, okay?" He started to back away, before learning down and grabbing Jack's arm.
"Not there!" Jack yelped. "Not there!" Kenny went to grab the other shoulder and Jack continued to scream.
When they'd taken off, there was blood soaked into the dirt, where Jack had been. Jesse looked on in confusion, his eyesight blurry and his heart racing.
"Daryl…" he whispered, "I'm sorry that I wasn't much use, I…"
Merle stared at the two of them.
"You're both useless," he told them gruffly and walked back inside.
"It's okay," Daryl told him, seeming to ignore Merle entirely. "That's just the way he is." He offered Jesse his hand. "We're going to go back inside. But we had better be on the move by morning – otherwise we might run into your old friends again, and I'm not really in the mood for them."
Jesse shook his head and stammered, "Y-yeah… Neither… neither am I." He was shaking, and Daryl put his hand on his shoulder. It seemed so bony in his hands… He must have lost weight. "Daryl," he whispered, looking up and wondering what the man really wanted from him in all of this.
Daryl smiled back at him, for just a second.
"We're going to have to be moving on a lot, until everything is done," he told him. "Are you ready for that?"
Jesse nodded.
"You saved me… twice. Anything you, you need me to do! I'll do it." He dragged his hand over his face. "I just… at the end of this… I'll see them again, right?" His voice started to break a little. "I miss them… I don't…know if I could remember what they look like, without… without the picture."
Daryl put a hand on his shoulder.
"You won't need it, soon enough," he promised.
