There was no earthly reason blood should ever feel like it was burning into someone as it splashed out of veins and arteries and onto exposed skin, no matter how fresh the wound. It did, though. Like it had been boiling under the surface, a lava flow waiting to erupt. He could feel the detail of every tiny drop that exploded outward, certain they were digging pockmarks into him, branding him for all the world to see. Etching the sin of his first kill across his face.
It was just one person. One body. Some guy dressed up in make-shift armor that looked like pot lids and scrap metal tied to football padding. Not enough to stop a bullet or a well-aimed stab, but enough to protect him until he was close enough to batter someone with the metal pipe he swung around. By all rights, Glenn should be the one collapsing to the ground with their head bashed in.
Glenn had reacted more out of instinct than any real training. He'd been given a BB gun for hunting and a baseball bat to protect himself at close range or if he ran out of ammo. The vault overseer felt that would be enough based on what the instructions accompanying GECK had said, in combination with the short range scouting missions that had happened a decade before. The idea being that the most he'd have to do was kill the occasional mutated animal for food while he made his way into the ruins of Atlanta.
It was a simple mission, really. Go in, make contact with what remained of civilization, trade some purified water for information, come back and let the overseer decide if it was time to open the vault permanently. The path had been clear. Three miles there, three miles back. Easy. Simple. Glenn had been fully prepared and briefed.
Only no one mentioned the crazy people that threw themselves at you just because they could. The ones with camps just off the road from the vault and the city where there were mutilated remains of other people they'd come across and decided had to die just for existing. Hung up like trophies and argued over like children who didn't want to share their favorite toys. No one mentioned that he might have to kill another person just to keep sharing the common courtesy of live and let live.
Glenn never really made it into Atlanta after that. He wandered aimlessly around the former quarry the Vault had been built into a couple hundred years before. He'd been disappointed when he first saw it. All the pictures they had inside showed vast forests of trees, bright green and towering. Birds flying overhead. Empty of other people who screamed and ran for you with their weapon raised high.
But it was just rocks upon rocks with the ruins of towering buildings in the distance. An occasional twisted, dry trunk of a tree that had somehow managed to grow for a few years would greet him. But they'd be so sad and lonely that after the first one he just tried to avoid them. Kept himself to the boulders and what remained of the roads. Scrub brush and random patches of grass the closest thing to greenery he met along the way.
He would have gone back inside the Vault if he could have. But they'd shut the door firmly behind him and it wouldn't open for a week. It was supposed to give him enough time to really take stock of the area and the state of the world. Which it sort of did. The world was in a state, after all. Just not one he'd been prepared for.
For two days he wandered around the quarry and the three-mile hike to and from the city before he met any travelers that didn't try to kill him right away. A couple of traders with a brahmin to haul their goods. Both of them were older, pretty grizzled from a lifetime in the world Glenn was only just starting to know. One was missing a hand, but had rigged together something akin to a multi-tool version of a hook to cover the stump. He walked along side like a guard, shotgun over his shoulder. The other led the brahmin but was just as well armed. He had more knives than Glenn could count and a strange cross between a gun and a bow that it looked like he'd stitched together from whatever remained of stumpy's hook and a pound of duct tape.
Glenn didn't think much of them at first. Not beyond the fact that they were moderately friendly and open with him about the dangers of the world. It was enough of a change from having to kill or be killed, however, that when they invited him to join them for a pace, he did so without much thought to where they might be going. Or the fact that he could only do it for a day or two before turning back.
The older of the two did most of the talking. He filled up the silence of the long walk with idle news from the surrounding area and the small communities that the trade route took them on. It was a two-week circuit. A shorter route than most, Glenn was informed, because the Dixon brothers did most of their trade not between communities, but between other caravans. They had regular meet ups to trade inventory and caps and had only two stops that brought them to dedicated homesteads.
On the first night, the older bedded down and the younger took first watch. He hadn't said much during the day, content to let his brother make his noise. But he'd been the one to offer Glenn a clean rag and some disposable, non-drinkable water to wash his face and hands.
"So they just leave you?" Daryl asked a little after Merle started snoring. "You don't look like you've been out long."
Glenn shook his head. He hadn't been able to get any words out beyond his name since he met them. He hadn't been able to get any words out since that first kill. He wasn't even sure he'd been able to feel anything but fear and hunger between long periods of being listless.
"Sorry," Daryl said after a moment. He stood up and moved to sit next to Glenn, pulled a cigarette out and lit it off the fire. After a couple puffs he even offered it over. Glenn shook his head again, not interested. They sat in silence for a while but Daryl seemed to think there was a need to fill it when his brother wasn't, because he started making less-than-idle conversation, "Seen people from your vault before. About ten years back, I'd guess. I remember the number. How clean they was. I was working the route with my pa, and Merle was trying to make a home for himself up in Woodbury. The people from your vault, they was visiting Grady Memorial, up in Atlanta. It was four of 'em-"
"Two," Glenn interrupted without really thinking about it. "I was briefed on that mission. Ed and Carol Peletier were the two who visited the remains of Atlanta to trade purified water for information and whatever they could that would help the Overseer learn about the world as it was then."
Daryl took a long drag on his cigarette nodded, and went on, "There was four of 'em. Ed and Carol, like you said. But another man and woman, too. Morals and Jack, I think? Morals was a bigger guy and Jack this pretty, skinny thing with really dark skin and kind eyes."
Glenn tilted his head and looked at Daryl, puzzled by that. The names were definitely wrong, but combined with the descriptions, he thought he could almost remember the faces. The real names on the tip of his tongue.
"They were doing trade with the Grady people," he continued, watching Glenn intently. "Then they came to do trade with Pa. Morals and Jack, they were talking excitedly about staying behind while Ed and Carol went back to tell their leader that the world were ready for you. About all the people and things being good. How much they'd appreciate what the Vault had to offer. They saw the good side of the world as it is now. Were hopeful folks. I liked them. Ed disagreed. He wasn't as good. Saw him cuff that Carol woman when he thought no one was looking."
Daryl took another drag, tapped some ashes off, "We were taking the same road back toward the vault. The quarry road was mostly avoided by the bigger predators and raiders back then. It was maybe a week after we'd seen them, back when Pa thought it was better to do more proper trade runs and we stayed two or three days near a community instead of just the one. We found their bodies near the lake. Morals and Jack. Necks broken, bodies stripped of all but their jumpsuits and those pip-boys. Pa took those, sold them down the line."
"But only Ed and Carol went," Glenn repeated. "Just the two of them."
"Whatever you say," Daryl shrugged. "You know what you know and I know what I saw. Anyway, I know you and yours ain't used to the world. They weren't neither. But if you want to learn about this world the way Morals and Jack did, you can keep with me and Merle. You'll be safer than they was."
Glenn frowned, "I have less than a week. Do you think that will be long enough?"
The other man shook his head, "Nah. Probably not. Not the way you need to." He brought his hand over, patted Glenn's knee, let it rest there. "But if that's all the time you want to stay, we'll keep you company. Could use something other than my brother's ramblin' on."
"What kind of company?" Glenn's eyes lingered on the hand that lingered on his leg. The fog of fear that hugged the otherwise emotionless void that had choked his senses for the last couple days had dissipated some and he was starting to feel like he could feel again.
Daryl's fingers ghosted their way up his thigh, to his hip. Then lifted to land on his shoulder. "Any kind you need, kid. It ain't easy to deal with takin' a life. And the first one is always the worst. I don't know how you want to deal with it, but I'm willin' to help you."
Glenn nodded. He understood the implication, though he wasn't sure he was ready to take the other man up on it just yet. He was still pretty numb and honestly a little confused about such a sudden offer. So he looked him in the eye and asked, "Why?"
"I been travelin' this route with Merle for going on six years now. Any company that ain't him and ain't tryin' to kill us is good company," Daryl smiled, dropping his arm. He clearly wasn't going to press and that made Glenn feel a little better about it. It helped.
"I think..." he scooted closer so he could lean into the man's shoulder and press his head there, "I just want to cry. Is that okay?"
"Sure, kid," Daryl's arm came up to hold him, rub his back. "You cry, you get some sleep, and in the morning we figure out if we gotta give you something for the jog back to your vault."
…
"You sure about this?" Merle asked, eyeing Glenn for a moment before glancing back at the road. "If you start running now you can just make it back."
Glenn shook his head and continued to adjust the leather armor Daryl dragged out of their pack for him. None of the clothes and armor really fit, but with the pads he could at least throw them over his vault suit. It would do until they could trade for something better. He rolled his shoulders before answering, "I'm sure. They'll send another scout out in ten years. It's protocol. By then I'll have learned enough to advise whoever comes out and give them a report to take back to the Overseer."
"That's assuming you live that long," Merle snorted, but he was smiling. In the last couple days, after Glenn got a good cry out of him and some sleep, he'd started talking. Gave Merle someone to banter with in the way Daryl wouldn't rise to. Gave Daryl someone else to have actual conversations with that didn't devolve into jokes about sex or dismemberment. The guy liked him.
Glenn liked him, too. He was pretty rough around the edges, but so was Daryl. They were good people. Honest, honorable.
"I better, or your reputation's on the line," Glenn countered with a laugh, grinning before he turned to Daryl. "Thanks again, for the armor. And everything else."
Daryl shrugged in that way he did and turned his head away, smiling softly, "Consider it payment for puttin' up with Merle for the next decade."
"And putting up with you?" he murmured so only Daryl could hear it, trying his best to be flirty. He was here to learn about the world and all it had to offer. And Daryl had yet to take any of his offers back.
Daryl eyed him for second, then snorted, "Consider that a perk. Now move your ass, we're wasting daylight."