Chapter 11 - Talker
The truck was still there but now its wheels were ground into the mud. Pete must have revved it hard.
"As soon as you see 'em crowdin' around the windshield you push those doors open and go, you hear me?"
"Pete!" Nick shouted, racing to the truck and flinging the half-open doors back. "He's not in here!"
"Check around," someone said. I was in a daze.
"Pete!"
Something on the ground caught my eye. I lifted my nose to the air and could almost taste the iron in Pete's blood. As if led by this I paced to a nearby boulder, gently running my hand over its dark, craggy surface. When I raised my fingers, they were coated in blood. On the ground at my feet, the trail continued, and ended at Pete's body, contorted upon the ground. His mouth hung agape, one of his legs was bent the wrong direction entirely, and his insides were spilling from his gut. Near him lay a walker, in no better shape.
"Oh my God," Clem murmured, so close to me I could feel her breath on my neck. Footfall told me everyone had heard and they crowded around us.
"What happened!?" Nick pushed us aside. "What the hell happened to him?" He knelt, his body wracked with silent sobs. "Why did you leave him?" He shouted in my face. I wanted to shrink, not from Nick, but from this image of Pete, who had for all intents and purposes been a savior of mine. I tried to remember our conversation before I'd fled, but even the flashbacks of that wouldn't come. No, I was irrevocably grounded in this moment. Drowning in it.
"He's been shot," Carlos observed sadly.
"We have to move," Luke put his hand on Nick's shoulder.
"No, no..." he shoved him away. "We have to bury him."
"We don't have time, Nick!" Luke reached down, grabbing his friend and pulling him up. "You gotta get it together, man, we have to move!"
As Luke wrestled him away and the rest of the group began to follow, I knelt by Pete's body.
"Scout..." Clem spoke, her voice almost lost in my head. Should have known she wouldn't leave me. I cocked my head in her direction, but she said nothing else. Fighting the burn in my heart, I opened Pete's jacket. Inside one of the pockets the soft white corner of a photograph caught my eye. I pulled it free and held it lightly in my palms, staring down at my savior and the little boy who couldn't even kill a deer.