The new world has no time for noise, and so a quiet stretches on and into the deep of the wood. There is a stillness; a moment of breathlessness as uncertainty winds about them. There is a man holding a crossbow to her head, and she holds a buck knife to his throat in kind.
The bolt is electric. The knife is like fire.
They stand there, arms aching as time stretches on past comprehending. There is an intensity in the air; the sort of energy that preludes a lightning storm – something that will be quiet and deadly and beautiful. Neither moves, neither yields – they stand locked in the forest, waiting.
"- the hell?"
There had been a hesitation in his eyes in that first moment, a slight disbelief that she was real. Now he's looking her evenly in the eye, like he's looking for something that he's not sure he'll find. She stares back defiantly, her lips curled in a snarl.
There is a spike of fear. A tangible, real thing that she imagines her mother and father never thought she'd feel – not in this lifetime. It's thick and viscous and she wants to swallow it, but she can't – not now, not yet; that would be conceding too much. Instead she sets it back, tucking it away and burying it. A coolness settles over her; a calm as she remembers the police man whispering to her, don't be afraid.
And suddenly the cop is replaced by her father. He's whistling that sweet tune – laughter and tears – into the setting sun. It's her father murmuring to her in the woods, standing off to the side even as the man presses the bolt hard enough to her forehead to draw a fleck of blood.
"Don't be afraid. That's how you survive – forget what you have to lose, and fight like hell." Words her father once whispered into the night as he hovered over old memories. She had been young, and had hidden around the corner in her night gown as her father murmured himself to sleep. She'd never asked him about it.
He was right. The cop was right. Don't be afraid. With his crossbow pressed to her head, she had had nothing to lose - she didn't have a lot of options; she was pretty much dead already. Do or die. Fight like hell, or give up and die. There wasn't time for fear.
"Don't be afraid. That's how you survive – forget what you have to lose, and fight like hell."
They're still standing there, knife to throat and bow to brow.
"'The hell you come from?" The man growls.
She doesn't know who he is, and she doesn't want to. She stares him in the eye, and she sways and she blinks and she fights back the thick and sour flavour creeping onto her tongue. She stands with his bow to her forehead, and she feels the world tilting back and forth. She feels the pulse of his heart through the knife, beating in rhythm with the throbbing of her side.
His hands don't shake. Not like those virginal murderers with their shaking hands and shaking guns. They'd been easy to navigate; their fear had been real, and new.
His hands don't shake, and she knows it might not work. She might be tossing her life away, but she doesn't care. If he pulls the trigger she won't have room to care or think or breathe. If it doesn't work, than she's no better off than she is now.
And if it does...-
"Do it," she says. "It'll be the easiest thing you've ever done."
"What the fuck?"
The air thickens. He hesitates and blinks, and she's knocking the bow away and watching as the arrow looses and flies off into the woods. The man curses and swings back towards her, but she's turning and stumbling away. She had been fast once, when her legs weren't scabbed and her head wasn't foggy. She struggles now, her body failing her as she slips away into the trees.
She doesn't get far; the sharp sting of her aching side and the lancing pain in her knees slows her down. Her head is reeling. Every step she takes is disjointed and uncertain, and eventually she stumbles forward into the dirt. The knife falls from her hand, and it lays useless amongst the leaves and earth.
The softest gasp leaves her lips. She stays there, a deep weariness settling into her bones. She would laugh if she had the energy; her pathetic escape attempt foiled by her own wayward feet. The sky, she thinks, her feet had been reaching for the sky.
The wood offers a hush of air; the barest gasp of wind as something moves through the trees. She lies amongst the withered leaves and the earth roused by her fall. She thinks of her father, and his words in the dark of night. He had always tried to come back to her.
For the first time since the beginning, she allows herself to wonder if he had survived this new world. If he had lived and fought like hell.
She feels a sudden whoosh of air choke from her lips: now is not the time. It's never the time, she thinks. There is never time to sit and wonder and think.
She's pushing the tangent aside, wondering how a bump to the head could sidetrack her so effectively, when the soft crinkling of her bag catches her attention. Cal blinks and reaches for where she had left it, not wanting him to find her because of a god damned plastic bag. Her fingers skim across earth and leaves and nothing.
Her blood chills, and she feels a sudden rush as she realizes that she had forgotten the bag.
She scrambles for the knife and whirls around, her body low and ready. She looks like an animal; feral and dangerous.
The man is there, crossbow loaded and tucked into his arm.
"I don't want any trouble," Cal says.
"Helluva thing to want with that stunt you pulled back there," he growls.
"Not a lot of options with an arrow to my head," her voice is cracking, breaking. She wipes at her eyes and swallows her nausea.
"'Thought you were a walker."
He's angry. She can tell by the whitening of his knuckles, the grinding of his teeth – his lips thin and his eyes narrow and he looks like some wild dog ready to bite into her. She thinks briefly of a wolf stilling in the quiet of winter; there is nothing but intensity and hunger in a landscape rich with silence.
She knows she's treading on thin ice. She can feel it crumbling beneath her. "I don't want any trouble," she repeats.
She can feel the air changing and shifting – like a storm brewing at the edge of the sky. She waits, her fingers tightening around the knife.
"Where'd you find the doll?"
She blinks.
The storm comes to a head.
"Where the hell d'you find the doll?!" He takes a step forward. It's enough to have her slinking back with a snarl on her face and the knife raised.
"What are you talking about?" she can feel a dread that coils around her stomach. It is a stout fear, one that isn't for herself, but for someone she hasn't seen, someone she has never spoken to. It was dread for someone who had lost her doll in the woods and was now being hunted. She remembers the men yelling and hollering and whooping behind her. They hadn't let loose a single shot – they hadn't wanted her dead.
They hadn't wanted her dead.
He isn't put off by her response, if anything it makes him angrier. The crinkling bag is discarded at her feet, and she dares a cursory glance at the doll he clutches in his free hand. It stares back at her, blond hair dishevelled and dirtied and soggy. The little dirty spot on it gives her a sense of morbid hope – of a little girl free of any sick perversions of the new world. That treacherous thought nearly makes her gag.
"This jog your memory?"
She looks at it, but she doesn't say anything. She stares at the doll with its stitched mouth and button eyes. Somewhere in the woods, alive or dead, there was a little girl without her doll – a doll that could lead this man right to her.
She couldn't have that.
Cal feels disquiet - it's like air rushing past her ears as she runs from a group of men. A different fear than death; one that sits in a darker place than even the cool and calm of her father's words can reach. She feels a tightening between her legs, like her body is trying to hide within itself at the mere thought of it: rape.
She hopes that little girl is far from here.
Her knuckles are white, her fingers rigid around the hilt of the knife. "Who is she to you?" she asks, her voice low and reaching. She stares at the doll - she can't look away. "I'm not leading you to her. Not if you're going to hurt her..."
He is snarling, his finger tightening on the trigger. "Y'know where she is?"
"Fuck you."
"I ain't goin' to hurt her."
She stares at him, and she repeats herself, "who is she to you?"
He is quiet in reply. He's staring at the doll, his thumb tracing over the eyes and hair and the smudge. He takes a step back. It's as he's staring at the doll that she sees the flower.
It's smiling at her. A wide and happy face peaking out from his back pocket. She would have never seen it if he hadn't moved. She would have never seen the petals as white as snow, as pure and untainted as any child's life ought to be. She would never have seen the flower, and felt the sharp and dashing ache of beauty.
Something simple, andreal.
Something that wasn't looking for more time.
Something she never would have thought to see in a world of death and hate and suffering.
She looks at him, at the remorse in his eyes. It's a hope so deeply interwoven with pain that she doesn't quite know what to think.
Suddenly the crossbow is on her again, and his hope and pain is schooled and tucked away.
"She's just a lil' girl – I'm tryin' to get her back home," his voice is so low that she almost doesn't hear him.
"Is that flower for her?"
He shakes his head, "ain't none of your business."
"You got a group?" He doesn't say anything. "You're too clean to be on your own."
He scoffs, "observant."
She doesn't say anything. For a long moment they stare at one another, locked in their quiet standoff. "You with the group in town?" She eventually asks, and she watches the brief flash of confusion on his face.
"What group?"
She bites at her lip and considers him. "How long ago that little girl go missing?" When he doesn't say anything she lowers her knife. She casts one last glance at the flower. "You best find her," she whispers,"before they do."
"You best tell me where you found the doll then." The crossbow doesn't drop. His words are more threat than request. She can feel that intensity from him again – that hungry, angry silence that murmurs of a primeval animal slouching through a wintery wood.
There is a need in his voice; something that isn't dark and twisted. It's hope and pain and recompense, and it makes her hesitate.
"I'll show you," she says, sheathing the knife.
It is only then that his crossbow lowers.
She collects the bag, and he keeps the doll. They walk side by side. Neither lets the other walk more than a foot behind them. The suspicion in the air is thick enough that Cal doesn't remove her hand from her sheathed knife nor does she take her eyes off him or his bow. On occasion she loses her footing and stumbles, and he's always there, waiting for her to figure it out. He never offers her help; he simply watches as she holds her hand to her head and rubs the dizziness from her eyes.
When she lurches behind a tree to dry-heave into the dirt, he stops and waits. "You bit?" he asks.
Cal stands up and runs her hand across her forehead. "No." He looks at her torn up hands and bloodied shirt. She sighs. "Not every danger in the new world is dead."
"The group from town?"
"No," she whispers, "someone else."
He doesn't pry. They walk on into the silence of the woods until they're wading into the small creek. He doesn't struggle against the current, but Cal finds herself tiring as the shin-high waters push eagerly at her legs. She slips several times, effectively soaking her dirtied pants.
He doesn't look at her. He only waits and looks into the trees flanking the creek – eventually the gorge rises around them, and he casts his eyes as high along the cliffs as he can.
"She'da have to been following the creek at some point. Pro'ly only landmark she'd a thought of." He calls a name out suddenly, loud, and clear, and reverberating through the trees like a sudden crack of thunder. It shatters the silence, and Cal stands beside him with wide eyes, staring off into the trees for any sign of anything.
"Sophia?" She whispers the name.
"Yeah," he says.
They walk on a bit further before she motions to the small point bar of the creek. The sandy bank is relatively unscathed save for her own slight foot prints and the spot in which she'd recovered the doll.
He regards her with a careful eye before he moves past her. He doesn't turn his back to her, and his crossbow lounges almost lazily in his arms. She stands off to the side, one hand curled about the hilt of the knife, and the other pinching the handles of the grocery bag.
"Y'sure this is the spot?"
She looks at him sharply. He isn't looking at her, but out and across the water to the banks rising on either side. There is a small area he focuses on intently. "Yeah," Cal murmurs.
He considers her as he pulls the flower from his belt. The way in which he holds it makes her breath tighten in her throat. He hands it to her, and stares at it thoughtfully.
"Keep it safe," are the only words he offers before he turns and wades further into the water. As he moves away she gets the impression that everything he does is calculating – every action carefully plotted. This was as much a test as anything.
She follows him with her eyes as he moves through the water. At one point he sinks up to his belly – he lifts his crossbow overhead and continues on. She looks down at the flower; it would have been ruined if he'd kept it; it would have washed away and never been seen again.
Her hand falls away from her knife.
"Too silty," he mutters. "Water washed 'way any tracks."
There are questions she wants to ask, but she refrains. Instead she stands within the churning waters of the creek and watches him, and the darkening wood that surrounds them. The sun is setting, the shadows are stretching. The air is no longer thick with heat, but rather the coolness of the coming night. It would be dark in an hour.
She is swaying. Her vision is blurring. She lifts a hand to rub at her temple. When she blinks away the dizziness, she meets his gaze from across the creek bed.
"How'd it happen?" He's eyeing her hands, the sweat on her brow, the long slash in the side of her shirt. She can see the distrust in his eyes; he's still thinking about whether or not she's bitten. She can't blame him; she looks like shit.
"Just someone looking for more time," she mutters. The flower is suddenly heavy in her hand. Heavy enough that her arm aches. Like the doll, it feels as if it's turned to stone.
She rubs at her eyes.
For a long moment she considers what she needs to do to survive. She'd done well on her own, but now that she was stumbling through the woods, succumbing to the bitter sting of infection and the reeling sickness of a concussion, her priorities are changing. If she had her way she'd find a hole to curl up in, but her father is there in her mind. Her father, and the cop and his sweet tune, and the woman and her screaming child. I'll always try, they're whispering.
She thinks, she considers. She eyes the white flower tucked so carefully into her duct taped, gauze-wrapped, and throbbing hand. It's the one beautiful thing she has seen in what feels like an age.
"Is she your daughter?"
He's poking around a few bushes hugging close to the waterfront. When he hears her he scoffs, "Nah."
"Sweet kid?"
"She ain't bad," he mutters with a shrug, eyes still searching the ground.
"A lot of kids in your group?"
He glances at her warily, like he isn't sure whether he shoulder answer or not – it doesn't matter though, the protective look on his face says enough.
It's in that moment she makes a decision.
"Those men... from town. You don't want them finding that little girl. I can help you..." She's no hero, she'd be the first to admit that, but there were things in the world that couldn't be ignored. Somewhere in the woods there was a lost little girl; somewhere in the woods there was a group of monsters, of men with no good intentions. And this man – this rough and pensive and hopeful man - had somewhere safe and warm to rest.
She'd been alone so long; she'd pushed aside so much. The soggy doll sitting at his hip, the throbbing in her side, the swaying of the trees and earth and sky – they make the choice for her.
"I can help you find her," she says. "I can help you protect her from them."
He's quiet for a long moment, the indecision is clear in his eyes – eventually he nods. "What's your name?"
"Cal," she says.
"Daryl."
