Trigger WArning for everything Terminus related, cannobalism, gore, violence, read at your own risks...
As they dragged him, bound and gagged through the backdoor exit of the Terminus base, Daryl couldn't help but feel despair. He had survived so many things in his forty and some years of existence but this was taking the cake. Had he learnt nothing from the past? He would have shaken his head if he had enough leeway to do so, but it would have done him no good, just given his captors a sign that they had him subdued. He knew how much room he really had for pretending but he didn't want to give them that satisfaction. If he had to die, he would die proudly, and a free man. The bounds around his wrist couldn't keep his spirit in chains and all that...
He was full of shit, he thought, depleted, but this was all he had.
Perhaps 24 hours earlier
They had not set a course, not yet, delaying the moment when they would have to talk and acknowledge what they had exchanged so far. The night before had really felt like a step, a big step, the kind of step he had never taken with anyone, opening up about his past and his ghosts. He didn't feel vulnerable, though he had expected to, nor did he feel like he had made himself weaker. For once in his life, he had told his story, to someone who had listened, and it had been freeing. He had expected it to be so many things, had dreaded it, but when it had come to actually saying those words, which he had been playing on a loop ever since she had started opening about her own story, it had been easy.
However, he had been reluctant in using his voice again, as if it would taint what he had said. The degree of intimacy he was experiencing, with this person he had gotten to know such a short time ago was blowing his mind. The end of days was bringing surprises both good and bad with every day that passed. He felt like he was a whole new man, maybe finally a man, who was with a woman he held dearer than anything else in the world, for she brought him peace, of all things. He would not overstep, would not dare make a move, but he finally felt like he had found his alter ego, who was not his twin but the compliment to who he was and wasn't.
The reasons why he was reluctant to break the silence were but too obvious to him: what if they had crossed a bridge that they shouldn't have? This was new territory, one that could be very scary though he knew he was in good company.
The need to set a course was on his mind though and he was sure it was on hers too. They were too close to paths they had taken before where they risked encountering some old enemies.
As if to prove him right, they heard heavy breathings behind them, and he cursed silently as their eyes met and they both reached for their weapons. The walkers they discovered were children, had had to have been girls, and they bore a striking resemblance. Daryl tried to get Carol's eyes, to let her know he was going in for the tallest one, but he didn't manage to get her attention and he realized that she was staring at the children the way you did when you recognized who they had been before.
His mind went to Sophia but it couldn't be her, she was dead and had been so for over a year at least. The taller of the two children could have been a young teen upon further examination. The smallest one, which must have been 10 when killed if not younger was a mini version of the taller one. Those were not your average walkers.
He had encountered some of those in his travels, some walkers who were so small it made no sense that they had turned and not been eaten alive. The smallest one was relatively wound free, apart from a gunshot to the chest if the trails of blood were indeed from that injury he could see. The taller walker was in a much worse shape, with bits of flesh torn away around the neck and its chest. There was a trace of a bite on one of its legs, and this walker had suffered a great deal more than the small one when turning.
The more he looked at them, slowly walking to them yet firmly making their way there, the clearer the story seemed to be there. The walkers had to be family, youngest had died, gunshot wound, however it had happened, and the tallest one had been its first casualty. All in the family, he thought feeling nauseous. He thought of Merle, he thought of Lilah. He thought of Carol and himself, and all those who had lost a sibling in this never ending apocalypse.
It only made his determination stronger, the two walkers needed to be dealt with but Carol was still frozen on the spot.
A random thought came to him. She wasn't freezing just because those were two girls she could relate to, he had a feeling he could barely explain that she had known in a previous life maybe those girl-walkers. Carol didn't freeze, she acted even in the face of the most baffling danger, he told himself remembering how she had fought in that barn when the walkers had come in.
He may have looked quickly at the sky before clenching his fist around his bow, and swiftly, he shot two arrows through the heads of the walkers. Carol let out a choke as he did so, but she stayed still. The walkers fell, and he went to them quietly but quickly, to get his bolts back.
Carol was still standing still, looking at the corpses of the little girls finally dead for good
"You knew them?" He asked, needing his suspicions to be confirmed.
"Mika, and Lizzie", she whispered, gesturing first to the smallest then to the tallest. "They used to be… They used to be in my care at the prison. Their father died when there was the flu, and… And I don't know."
He had flashes of stories she had told him. She used to teach the kids how to handle weapons unbeknownst to the other adults. This was a sad testament to the fact that her efforts had been in vain, but then again, the girls had been young. At their age… Well, at their age he didn't know if he could have made it, he only had to deal with his no-good parents, while waiting for Merle to come back home.
"Fuckin' world," he said.
He checked the perimeter, and the two seemed to have been alone. He wasn't sure what he was to do, until she said:
"We bury them. People we knew, we bury them."
He wanted to say that those would be many corpses to put in the ground, but he realized this was insensitive on his part. He hadn't bounded with anyone, so giving respect to those he had known had never been something he had thought about, but to her, it meant a great deal.
"There's no shovels," he found himself saying after looking around.
"There's a couple of houses this way," she said, gesturing to the rooftops they could see. "Maybe we can find one there."
"Or more of those…"
He hated to say this, but they had to face the fact that they perhaps didn't have that leisure.
'You should go hunting, we need food," she told him, her eyes still fixated on the bodies. 'I'll go quickly to the houses, and see if I can get something. If I can't, then we leave them there."
But she needed to try. She didn't say it, but he heard it loud and clear. This was who she was. Even though those people were not her people anymore, she had to try and give them the respect she thought they deserved.
He wanted to tell her that going separate ways was a stupid decision, but it wasn't, really the houses were close. They needed some food. If they gave themselves strict instructions, they could be parted for a short while and hopefully still get back together.
His main concern was the marauders being around. He hadn't seen them in a few days but they had been walking close to the tracks this morning, and this was where he knew the claimers were hanging around. He couldn't bear the thought of her getting captured. He had heard some of the comments by their former captors those few times they had had to hide from them after their escape, and to say the guys were sore sports would be the biggest understatement of the year. Maybe even the decade, or the century. Guys held a grudge, period, and he wasn't sure what they would do if they found them… Nah He knew exactly what they'd do and it wouldn't be pretty.
So even though it was the last thing he wanted, he nodded. He would go hunting as she went for the houses. He had this feeling in his gut, this weird protective feeling which despised the fact that he was "letting" her go on her own but he also knew better than to think he held any power over her mind once it was set. The way she had handled needing to pretend she was his victim was just another proof of how committed she could be when it came to staying alive.
"An hour" he told her. "Houses are 10 minutes away, you rummage for about an hour and then you come back straight to me, you got it?"
She nodded, didn't argue with the short time he was granting her. He knew he was cutting it a bit too short, but she looked too distressed, and on the other hand he knew better than to think she couldn't get everything done in that time.
He came to stand in front of her, and reached for her face, forcing to stop watching the two bodies on the ground.
"Stay safe, okay?" He said.
He saw many emotions reflect in her eyes, confusion, sadness but also resolution. She would get this done. Even if it was the last thing she did, she would get the girls buried. She nodded again, and he let his hand linger on her cheek, hoping that she would be able to read all those things he didn't know how to say.
Another nod, and then she ran silently toward the houses they had spotted.
This would be the longest hour of his life, he thought, as his eyes fell on the two dead girls once again. How the hell had they come to be this? How the hell had they managed to come back up to here, and still haunt the one woman who had been more of a mother to them than anyone else at the prison? He knew but too well how to read in between the lines of Carol speech, and he knew that she had bounded with the girls.
Some people were cursed, his drunk buddy from the bar would tell him, and he had never given it two thoughts, thinking that if people were indeed cursed then he had to be on that list and he didn't like the idea of not having any say in what happened next to him because of a supposed curse hanging over his head. He didn't want to believe Carol was cursed either. Or maybe she was cursed: she cared too much, and everything that came back to bite you in the ass when the world came down were more strikes on her psyche.
He wanted to be there for her, but didn't know what to say.
He heard steps and was struck with how careless he had been. Carol had been gone for a while now, maybe ten minutes, and he had been standing still, not hunting.
He jumped into a bush, and tried to get a look at what was coming his way. It was a group, five guys, young, and he noted surprisingly, well-fed. You didn't encounter people who were not suffering from malnutrition anymore, not in this day and age. Their health and the fact that they had for some of them some fat on their bones made them stand out more than if they had been giants.
"Ugh, these two are even deader than dead," one of them said, looking at the two corpses.
"Pity too, you know they taste better when they're young."
He thought his ears were playing tricks on him, that he had been too mellowed out by his confession time, the rupture in his routine of being a tough guy, and that his brain had just gone all mushy and unsharp. Taste? He thought.
"I have a question actually," one of the guys said, coming to crouch next to one of the girls.
"I can feel the Nobel Prize question coming," one of the guys said.
He had to be the leader, it was in the way he held himself. There were two very self-assured men around him, but they stayed a step behind him, as if they were ready to protect him but also as if they knew better than to believe they were his equal and could walk with him.
"Just hear me out, Gareth. We all know what meat we eat, and why. We also know that the younger the meat, the tenderer it is. On the other hand, we also know that all that is dead comes back to life. That we carry this thing in us, makes us one of them if we go through the process."
Horrified, Daryl stood still, as he looked at the guns they were carrying. He had no escape route. He needed them to walk right by him and not see him, or he would be dead.
"What's your fucking question?" the leader asked.
"Well, those were young, and could have been good. Why don't we eat them? We can't catch what they're having, they're twice dead now."
Eat. It was there again.
"Let me put it this way, we're all dead men walking, with this thing in us. But we're not dead. Would you go with a beautiful chick that had AIDS, knowing you're dying anyway? Or would you be pickier and not expose yourself to this new level of threat, just in case Mother is right and we are the chosen people?"
So casual when talking about eating people… Daryl shuddered.
"Yeah, it makes sense. Sorry. We need to find a new shipment, spam just doesn't taste the same once you've had the real deal," the guy said, getting back up and finally leaving the corpses alone.
Had he really been talking about possibly eating dead walkers? Who were they, vultures? And Biblical freaks too? What was all this nonsense about Chosen people and shit?
Daryl thought of Carol, and felt terror in his heart. The Marauders crew seemed so tame in comparison…
"Still, I'm going to take a token", the younger man said, taking a knife out and lifting Lizzie's arm, ready to cut it off.
Those girls were dead, twice so, yet Daryl couldn't help himself, thinking about the pain it would cause to Carol if she came back and found the people she wanted to pay her last respect to mutilated, and he shot the young guy in the head, not thinking twice.
And all hell broke loose.
Within seconds, the others were on him, talking about making roast, and making him dinner and more. They seized him and the more he struggled, the harder they kicked back of course. He could feel blood running down his face, and he was sure his ribs had to have bruised if not broken for some of them. They punched him, and as he struggled they took his vest and ripped his shirt from his back. They and were just about to give him the final blow, when Gareth yelled:
"Stop!"
He heard the herd, but they didn't, or not right away. Gareth was focused on the skin they had exposed, and once again, Daryl felt eyes on his back, his goddam fucking marred back.
"The prophet." Gareth said.
"You don't believe that shit, do you?" One of the guys, a dark-haired asshole asked.
"I don't, but Mother does. Let's bring him back, and let her see him. When she's decided he's not the one she's been waiting on, you'll get your pound of flesh," the guy named Gareth told the younger guy who had been asking those disgusting questions before.
They tied him up, and he was like a lifeless doll. They shoved his rag into his mouth and tried to force him to walk. Had it been only him, he would have stalled and stayed behind, willing to be eaten by the herd he could hear coming rather than let those assholes have him, but there was Carol. He heard them spit out orders in talkies, about rockets and more as he allowed the jerks to take him, and make him walk back to their fucking camp, he thought of Carol, and how he would have done anything to prevent her from coming back to those psychos. She survived, didn't she? Maybe he didn't. But if she did, he was okay with that.
Carol was on auto pilot, her eyes locked on the houses, thinking that they needed shovels, to give Lizzie and Mika the eternal rest they were due. She didn't believe in Heaven, but rest, eternal rest at least, she could get behind. She hoped they were sleeping. She hoped they had gotten free of themselves and the monsters inhabiting them along the way.
This world, she thought. This fucking world.
She had never been big on swearwords before the turn, and Ed had made sure she kept her mouth saintly, but part of the many ways she had gotten free of his hold had been by calling a cat a cat, or a motherfucker a motherfucker. Words had power, and when you had been forbidden to use them for so long, their power only grew.
Lizzie and Mika. Lizzie and fucking Mika. Fucking Lizzie. Fucking hell period.
Shovels, she told herself, they needed shovels. They couldn't dig them graves like animals.
She heard a whimper, and the sounds of feet on the ground. This was not good. One hour had been the deal with Daryl, she thought, and she had no idea how long had gone by.
She entered the first house she found, and watched, hidden, as a group of walkers almost brushed past her.
Daryl, she thought. Daryl.
She couldn't lose him too. She had already lost two persons today. She had lost two little girls who had wanted to call her mom, and had relied on her to keep them safe. How much more losses would she have to take? She didn't want to discover she had a breaking point, but if Daryl didn't make it, or worse, then she would knew for sure she was not unbreakable.
She held back a silent cry, forcing herself to keep quiet.
The pack went by, and very slowly and carefully, she went to the other end of the house, listening to every sound, ready to take out whoever came her way. She went into the garage, thinking that if there was a shovel around, it would be there and she would be able to run back to Daryl.
She expected walkers, because this was what the world was made of. What she didn't expect were ghosts of her life to come back to haunt her.
Tyreese. Tyreese was here, crouched on the ground, a weapon in his hand, though completely unsteady. Judith let out a gurgle, and Carol realized they were not ghosts. She wondered how many times your heart could break in a day, or even an hour. Tyreese looked about ready to lose it, but Judith… Judith was just a baby, vulnerable, harmless, and perfect.
Carol found herself on her knees, prying the baby from Tyreese's hands. He looked like he had seen a ghost except that ghost would have been the one ghost that sent him over the edge.
"Tyreese, what happened?" Carol asked in hushed tones as she felt the formidable warmth of Judith against her skin.
"The girls…" He said. "The girls."
Nothing ever happened at random, this was not who they were.
He had been with the girls. He knew they were not themselves anymore.
"I know," she said. "We had to take them out this morning."
And Tyreese started crying silently.
With the baby in her arms, alive and well, Carol watched the man who had been her friend break apart.
He told her a story, a horror story, where Lizzie had been wanting a walker friend for a while and had killed her sister to get it. He told her about coming back from a quick run to find Mika dead, and Lizzie waiting for her new pet to come back to life.
He told her about the moment when that thing that had taken Mika's place opened its dead eyes and attacked its former sister.
And he told her how he had run.
"I just couldn't… I couldn't. I needed to save Judith, and I did, but I couldn't," he kept saying, and she knew what he meant was put them down.
"I'm not the kind of person you are," he told her.
This struck a chord in her soul as she remembered the anguish she had felt putting down David and Karen.
"I know what you did, to Karen," Tyreese said, as if reading her thoughts. "Rick told me. It made no sense. It fucking made no sense. Even when the flu out down at the prison and we had so many casualties, it made no sense why you would do that. Then yesterday happened, and Mika was dead, and Lizzie was dead…"
"And it started making sense," she whispered, holding in her tears, not wanting to distress the baby, as they couldn't tell if they were surrounded by walkers or safe in this garage.
"You… You would have…"
"But you didn't."
She didn't blame him, couldn't blame him. As she caressed Judith's head, and gave it a light kiss here and there, she thought back to the scene of the morning, when the two walkers had emerged behind them, and she had frozen, thinking to herself "how many children will you have me take down?", not sure who the "you" in that sentence would have been. She remembered how lost she had felt, and how she had seen Sophia's face all over Lizzie's. Mika had been but a baby in so many ways when she had left. How many children did she have to put down before her price was paid, and what was she being ransomed for?
But then Daryl had stepped in, and with only a look, had taken her fate in his own hands, as if shouting "no more" to whoever was putting her on trial. He had been weirdly gentle in the way he had taken down the two girls she had known, he hadn't bashed their heads in or anything. It had been nothing short of respectful, and he had never known them. He had only known her. He had decided to act, and take this burden off her hands, knowing it would not be the worst thing he ever had to do but it would have come a close second or so to some of the things she had to live with.
She hadn't thanked him, she realized suddenly. She needed to thank him. He was a good man, a much better man than he gave himself credit for, and she needed to make him see that.
In the end, he sort of was everything nowadays.
Her companion, her shoulder to cry on. Her friend. Her only friend, and the best. Her… man.
They heard a bang and Judith started crying, forcing her to come back to what was real. It was more than just a simple wake up call for this little interlude of catching up, she realized, and she found herself on her legs, handing the baby to Tyreese.
Daryl, she thought. She needed to get back to Daryl.
Three chapters and it will be a wrap. I will be sad to see this story end!