Chapter Thirty Two: Guilt
Guilt: a feeling of having committed wrong or failed in an obligation.
Day 69
The night sky was an endless black expanse over the world, Daisy stared up in wonder at the thousands upon thousands of twinkling scars that dotted the darkness. The absence of light pollution was something that she did not think she would get used to, she smiled as her chin dipped and her gaze drifted over to the crackling orange blaze of fire in the centre of their haphazardly gathered group. Similarly smiling faces surrounded the campfire, each feeling lightened in the wake of their welcoming onto Hershel's property. Though they had been relegated to sleeping in tents by the house, this did not cause them much disappointment. They were just happy to be alive and safe.
"Pass me a beer," Daryl mumbled to Daisy, nudging at her lounging leg with a disparagingly muddy boot, she did not move save to shoot him an expectant look. He took the hint replied accordingly, "Please?"
"I will pass you a beer, Daryl! Thank you for your nice manners," Daisy replied quietly with an exaggerated smile, snorting to herself at his predictable eye roll. She leaned over and eased the cooler open, digging down amongst the slushy, somewhat melted ice to surface the coldest bottle.
"Thanks," he grumbled as she handed the bottle to him; she was continually amazed at how turbulent he made any interaction with him. Before she was able to dwell on this thought too long, she saw a colony—or whatever the word was—of fireflies fluttering beneath the low-hanging branches of a nearby tree. Her eyes flitted up and down with the swirling patterns the golden, glowing creatures made in the air, a sense of purely innocent enjoyment that she had not felt in too long filling her chest until she thought she might burst.
Daisy sighed and turned back to the group, absent-mindedly bringing the neck of her own beer closer and taking a sip, wincing at the taste but enjoying the warmth that spread through her chest.
"You even legal, girly?" Merle chuckled with a wide and happy smile—same as the rest of them—wiggling his brow at her when she turned to look.
"Uncalled for," Daisy pouted to herself, narrowing her eyes back at him, "I'm twenty-three...just 'cause you're old as hell..."
"You're twenty-three?" A voice suddenly popped in from behind her, Daisy glanced back to see Glenn smiling with glee, "You're a baby!"
"What?" Daisy asked with incredulity, sitting up from her lounging position to address Glenn at eye-level, "You cannot be more than a few years older than me, get off your high horse."
"I will stay on my high horse, thank you very—"
"You're both babies," Lori interjected from across the fire with an indulgent smile, "Amy too. Dinner tomorrow night y'all can sit at the kiddie table with Carl and Sophia if you're gonna squabble like them."
A low chuckle fluttered throughout everyone but Glenn, Daisy and Amy, the latter had sat up indignantly at being caught in the crossfire. Daisy shared a meaningful glance with Glenn and Amy, deciding to stand with them in solidarity against the old fogies.
Day 70
Daisy was standing in front of the green-painted door of the Greene family home, feeling remarkably as if she had been called to the principal's office, one hand posed to knock against the wood. With a nervous grimace at the fluttering sensation in her stomach, Daisy went to knock when the door suddenly fell back away from her fist, the nervously smiling face of Patricia suddenly appearing and in threat of being punched by Daisy.
Retracting her hand, Daisy's grimace turned to a sheepish smile, "Hey, there! I hear Hershel's looking for me?"
"C'mon in," Patricia said, ushering Daisy in without another word, pointing her down the small hall to the kitchen. Daisy spared a confused glance for the woman, but decided to follow her urging and meet promptly with Hershel.
Upon entering the kitchen, Daisy saw Hershel seated at a small table with his daughters, each with a nervous aura similar to that of Patricia's, Glenn stood off to the side shooting small glances towards Maggie.
"You, uh, look..." Daisy belatedly decided not to bring up their currently nervous dispositions, "I mean, you wanted to see me?" She cursed her own perpetuation of the called-into-the-principal's-office theme with her choice of words.
"Sit," Hershel made it sound like a polite order, so Daisy did so, "I believe you know Otis?"
Daisy glanced between the faces of Hershel, Maggie and Beth, then shot Glenn an inquiring look and received nothing, "Yeah...he helped us out," she clarified.
"Yesterday, Otis and Beth's...boyfriend Jimmy left to search for Beth and they did not return at the time we had agreed upon," Hershel said, hesitating with a long look at his youngest daughter at having to call the kid her boyfriend. Daisy furrowed her brow.
"I'm sorry," she said for lack of better words, "Did you want us to help look for them?"
Hershel looked relieved, "Now, I know you don't owe us any favours, but—"
"We'd be happy to!" Glenn interjected with a bright smile, eyes flickering to Maggie for a moment as if to gauge her reaction to his outburst. The beginnings of a grateful smile were lifting Maggie's cheeks, and Glenn brightened even further, nodding resignedly to Hershel—though some nervousness returned at Hershel's suspicious glance between the two.
"We would," Daisy said, half trying to help Glenn out and detach Hershel's attention from him, "Like to help, that is. You're allowing us to stay here, so I say we owe you a whole lot." Daisy smiled towards Hershel and his daughters, "Besides, we have a whole lot of self-sacrificing boneheads who'd love to do anything to save anybody; that includes Otis and Jimmy!"
Hershel hummed in reluctant agreement, before elaborating, "I thought that you and your friend here," he nodded towards Glenn, "Might go into Senoia and gather some supplies, look around for any sign of them." Daisy nodded agreeably, sparing a glance for Glenn. When she saw that he was grimacing slightly and widening his eyes toward her, then shooting meaningful looks at Maggie, Daisy took his meaning and reconsidered.
"Or, maybe Glenn and Maggie could go into town, she knows the area better and...me and my people can cover the surrounding woods?" Daisy suggested with a placating smile.
Hershel huffed and seemed to think for a moment, before looking searchingly at his daughter, who nodded emphatically. He then nodded decisively, "If you think that would be best."
Later
The air was rife with the twittering of small birds as they rustled through the trees, and disparagingly absent of any cries for help of those missing. Daisy and Rick were partnered in the search for Jimmy and Otis, tasked with searching the north-eastern quadrant, while Merle and Daryl searched the south-eastern, Maggie and Glenn searched the nearby town of Senoia and Shane and Andrea searched the northern-most area. Meanwhile, Dale, T-Dog, Carol and Lori lived it up back at the camp. Daisy huffed a breath and wiped the gathered sweat from her brow, thinking that household chores might have been a better alternative to what had yet to be fruitful searching for missing people.
"You hear that?" Rick suddenly spoke over the low hush of natural sounds, Daisy tilted her head to look down from where she had stopped atop a tiny mound.
"No. I hear nothing," Daisy said with hopelessness dulling her tone.
"Sounds like a walker," Rick said in a pointedly quiet voice, nodding his head for her to follow after him as he surfaced his knife and held it tightly in hand.
Daisy sighed and longed for the far away, pre-apocalypse days of lounging and eating Cheez-Its while binging dumb reality television, then shook her head of fantasies and came back to the present moment, warily trudging down the short incline and joining Rick.
At his expectant look, Daisy also slid her knife from her belt and held it ahead of her, peeking around Rick's shoulder to see a run-down cabin hiding down a small ditch behind large, overgrown bushes. Though, upon coming closer it seemed to be more of a similar size to a tool shed than a cabin.
Rick placed a hand on the termite-eaten and blue peeling paint-covered door of the shack and glanced back toward Daisy. His other hand moved up as if to make some sort of sign, before he thought better of it and decided that Daisy would almost certainly not understand, so he just whispered, "Be ready. Knife up."
Daisy's knuckles whitened as her fingers tightened around her blade, exhaling slowly as Rick pushed open the door and it swung back with a low creaking sound on its rusted hinges. The low moan that Rick had heard made itself known to the apparently less-perceptive Daisy, the golden light of day flooded the shack through the opened door, revealing a figure steeped in shadow and curled in on itself.
It raised its head a few inches and focused its hazy, heavy-lidded gaze on the intruders, snapping its teeth and spitting at them as hunger began to trickle into its eyes. If not for the heavy wooden pallet weighing down on its body, the walker would surely have been up and sunken its teeth into their flesh, but Rick and Daisy were thankfully safe from it save the unlikely possibility that one of them became careless enough to position their ankles close enough for its perusal.
"Do you...think that's Jimmy?" Rick asked hesitantly, moving forward to inspect the walker's face more closely.
Daisy's eyes widened and her gaze dropped to the floor, she realised, "We don't even know what the kid looks like...whose bright idea was it to have a bunch of people who don't know what Jimmy looks like search for him?" Rick shot her a side-eye and she recalled that it was her own idea, "Okay...consider that a rhetorical question."
She stepped beside Rick and bent down to examine the walker with him, it turned its head toward her and snapped its teeth threateningly, "It's a boy...and looks to be around Beth's age...freshly deceased," Daisy concluded.
"Could be our guy," Rick agreed.
"I say we put him down and go back, see if they have a picture of him," Daisy proposed, Rick nodded in agreement, "You can..." She trailed off, gesturing vaguely between the knife in Rick's hand and the walker's snarling face.
Promptly, Rick reached down and twisted his fingers into the short, brown hair of the walker and held his head down against the dirt floor of the shack, then pierced the back of its head in one clean push of his knife. The growling ceased and so did the struggling movements of the walker. Rick stood and backed off, Daisy stayed in her crouch for a time studying the kid, hoping that he wasn't Beth's boyfriend. Maybe he was just some random kid who got caught in the shack and died, but a feeling deep in the back of Daisy's mind told her that he wasn't.
Glancing off to the side, Daisy noticed a straw hat sitting just under a nearby chair, dotted with blackened blood. She swiped it up and looked back at the kid, thinking that maybe the hat belonged to him. From what Hershel had told her, he had helped out around Hershel's farm...farm-people wear hats, don't they? Daisy figured it was worth a try, so she took the hat with her when she left the shack.
Outside, she found Rick leaning against a nearby tree, long and forlorn look on his face. Steeling herself for whatever unnecessary guilt she was about to face, Daisy approached him.
"He's just a kid," Rick said suddenly.
"Yes...?" Daisy drew out the word, fishing for whatever Rick obviously wanted to get off his chest.
"He shouldn't've died, regardless of whether he's Jimmy or not."
"His death wasn't your fault. You are aware of this, right?" Daisy said bluntly, narrowing her eyes when she saw that Rick startled, she had been correct in her guess of what he had been thinking.
"He shouldn't've died," Rick repeated.
"No, he shouldn't've," Daisy agreed. She sighed, then tried to reason with him, "You didn't even know him, he likely died before we brought Beth back. You are not responsible for every death under the sun."
"But if we had stuck around, tried to get Hershel to change his mind—"
"Hershel told us to leave, so we left. He rejected the possible protection we could have given him," Daisy reasoned. Rick's jaw tightened, she was almost beginning to regret fostering ties with people this unreasonably stubborn.
"My dad died six years ago, did you kill him too?" Daisy asked incredulously, narrowing her eyes at Rick, "Honestly...get over yourself." The lack of heat behind her words portrayed that she did not intend for the words to sting, Rick gave a long sigh and nodded, his brow still furrowed in guilt. Daisy looked at him for a long moment, then decided with a firm nod that it was likely the best she was going to get.