Red River Blue
Chapter 42
Putting one foot in front of the other, Wren walked with her arms outstretched to try and help her balance. Mika was doing the same on the other side of the train tracks. The contest had been raging for most of the afternoon, both girls trying to see who could balance on the thin metal section of the tracks longer than the other. Every so often Carol would signal back to them that they needed to get down and catch up with the group. The conest would then be put on a brief hold while the two girls ran ahead to join the rest of the group before it started again.
Wren had been relieved when Lizzie chose to tag along behind Carol and Tyreese for most of the morning. She still wasn't happy about the way the other girl had pushed her into that walker and though she was a sweet and gentle girl for the most part, Wren was not without some of the Dixon anger that tended to run hot on her father's side of the family. Lizzie had finally grown bored of walking along with the adutls and was currently trudging along behind them. Two different times already she had bumped into her younger sister and tried to make it look like an accident. The last time Lizzie had slammed into the smaller girl so hard she sent Mika flying down onto the splintery wooden part of the tracks.
Wren watched Lizzie out of the corner of her eye and when it looked like she might go for Mika again, Wren stuck her foot out and tripped her. Lizzie fell face first onto the tracks and came up with a nasty looking chunk of wood sticking out of her palm.
"Whoops!," Wren called out in a little sing song voice, "Guess you should have been watchin' where you walked so you didn't bump into anyone." Lizzie got to her feet and yanked the small sliver of wood from her hand, tossing it to the ground in disgust. She cast a hateful glance at Wren, who had already stepped down from the metal beam and onto solid ground.
Wren never had to fight much at school because everyone was afraid of her older sister. But that didn't mean that she didn't know how. Harley had made damn sure she knew how to defend herself. Thinking of Harley made her homesick. Wren had never given much appreciation to the type of sister she had. But watching Lizzie and Mika together she was suddenly grateful for Harley in a way she never had been before. Not that Harley never gave her shit. They were still sisters. But here, alone in the woods surrounded by strangers and undead cannibals, Harley would have been worried about keeping them safe not shoving Wren off a balance beam for no reason.
Lizzie took a step towards Wren. Lizzie was a little taller. But Wren was older and puberty had added a little more weight to her through the hips and thighs. She let Lizzie take one more step in her direction before both her arms shot out and slammed hard against the other girl's chest. Lizzie staggered backwards and almost fell on her ass. Wren stood with her feet apart and her legs slightly bent. She remembered seeing Harley fight another girl once after a basketball game. And so she repeated what Harley had told the much larger and heavier girl before she beat the crap out of her and two of her friends that tried to jump in.
"Come at me bitch," Wren hissed. At that invitation Lizzie decided that she had enough. The girl turned and ran to catch up with Carol. Mika giggled as she watched her sister hurry away. She reached across the small space and grabbed for Wren's hand, squeezing it with her own.
"Thanks," Mika whispered. She paused a moment before she added, "My sister is really messed up." Wren could tell from Mika's tone that she wasn't saying it to be mean. She sounded sad and even a little apologetic when she spoke about her sister's mental health. Wren nodded and kept hold of Mika's hand and they walked together for while, taking turns at a silly rhyming game that Mika liked instead of balancing on the tracks.
TWD
"I wish my dad was here to see this," Wren chirped, "I helped cut them up before but this is the first one I shot myself." Carol smiled as she yanked back harder on the hide of the deer while Tyreese made a sloppy job of trying to cut the skin loose from the meat of the animal with the dull side of his knife. Carol wasn't sure what was funnier, how inept Tyreese still was at butchering game meat or the look Wren had on her face while she was watching him do it. Like it was hurting her worse than the dead deer.
"You can tell him all about it when you see him again," Tyreese suggested. Wren had little Judith balanced on her hip and she was hovering close to him. Every time he made a cut she wrinkled her pretty little face up in disgust. Tyreese grabbed a rag and cleaned his hands up before he held his arms out for the baby. He still wasn't sure why he thought it would be a good idea for him to butcher the deer up but at the time letting the girls do it while he stood by and held the baby just hadn't seemed like the right thing to do. "How about I hold her and you help Carol?," he asked, trying not to laugh at how eager the girl was to shove Judith at him and grab up the knife he had been using.
Carol and Wren chatted back and forth a little while Tyreese sat down nearby and let Judith crawl around in the grass. Aside from butchering a deer Carol felt relieved by the routine domesticity of the day. The cabin had enough gas left in the large tank outside to justify the use of the oven and Carol had spent the morning baking the girls candied pecans. Tyreese had proved his usefulness by getting water to flow from the pump well on the side of the cabin.
Carol had never spent much time with Tyreese before and she was plesantly surprised to see what a kind and gentle man he was. Sadly this only served to make her feel more guilty about what she had done to his girlfriend Karen. At the time Carol had believed that she was keeping everyone in the prison safe. But seeing how much Tyreese was still grieving for the woman he lost was wearing heavily on her conscience. When she heard him crying quietly on the porch outside the cabin the night before she had felt a strong urge to go to him and confess everything. Her fear over what his reaction might be had been the only thing that kept her from telling him.
"Maybe we should stay here a while," Tyreese suggested, smiling at Judith as she grabbed for his face. "We have water, food..." Carol nodded her agreement without adding on her own reason for wanting to stay put. To speak her hopes out loud would be to admit her feelings and she wasn't even sure she was ready to admit them to herself. But deep down she knew or at least hoped that there was some small chance that Daryl was looking for her. He was an experienced tracker. And the best way to find a tracker was to stay put and let them find you. At the very least Carol was one hundred percent sure that Merle was looking for his wife and daughters. Which meant that hopefully sooner rather than later Carol's little group might be found by one or even both of the two men.
As Wren leaned inside the carcass to start cutting the loins out, Carol heard a scream from the other side of the clearing. She let go of the rib cage of the deer, splattering Wren's chest and face with blood and juices. Carol had sent Lizzie and Mika out to pick peaches, warning them to not to stray too far from the cabin. At the time letting the girls out of her sight felt wrong. But she had told herself that she wasn't going to let losing Sophia cloud her judgement and turn her into a hovering mother hen. Lizzie and Mika had to learn to live in this world. She couldn't shelter them constantly. Picking peaches was something that they were perfectly capable of.
Grabbing for the knife on her belt, Carol ran in the direction the screams had come from. She heard Wren's feet pounding behind her. As Carol ran a thousand horrible thoughts flew threw her mind. The scariest one being that those men that Tyreese had seen near Wren's mom's camper had found them. Carol could fight walkers but she wasn't going to be able to fight off an entire group of grown men. She was also afraid that she might be too late to help the girls. By the time she got there Lizzie and Mika might already be dead.
Unlike what happened with her own daughter, none of Carol's worst fears came true under the grove of peaches. She got there in time. Mika had caught her pants on a section of barbed wire fence. There were some walkers coming at her but Wren was able to draw them away, the fresh deer's blood on her shirt being a blessing in disguise. The smell drew them away from Mika and gave Carol time to pry the girl's sock and pantleg off the tangle of wire she had caught it on.
"We don't have to kill them," Lizzie cried out, "Mika's fine we can just let them go."
She was talking about the walkers. Carol already had several conversations with the girl about them. They were dangerous. They weren't people anymore. Walkers would kill you and eat you if they had the chance. They weren't stray dogs that Lizzie would be able to train and make friends with. Carol was very disappointed to see that none of her words had made an impression on the girl. Ignoring Lizzie's protests, Carol stepped over the fence and took out two of the walkers on the other side. Wren got the last one but letting it trip over the fence and stabbing it in the head once it was already on the ground. That made Carol smile a little. Wren was short like her mother and had adopted the woman's technique of getting the walkers on the ground first and then taking them out. River was the first real female friend Carol had ever had in her adult life and the small reminder of the woman Carol realized she missed her more than she ever expected.
"You didn't have to do that!," Lizzie cried out. Tears were welling up in her eyes and she turned and ran off towards the cabin with her ponytail flying and swinging out behind her. Wren rolled her eyes as she leaned down to help Mika up off the ground.
"She didn't push you into that fence did she?," Wren asked the girl. Mika glanced towards Carol nervously.
"Did she push you?," Carol asked. She knew Lizzie was having some problems coping with her father's death but she had no idea that the girl had been taking it out on her younger sister or she never would have sent them off alone together. Mika looked at Wren. The older girl nodded her head, indicating that Mika ought to tell Carol the truth about what was going on.
"She did," Mika said nodding her head affirmatively. The girl paused, afraid to say anything else because Lizzie had threatened her of what would happen if she did. Wren stepped forward and wrapped her arm around the smaller girl's shoulder.
"Go ahead and tell," she encouraged, "I won't let her get you." Carol was a little shocked at the way Wren was speaking about Lizzie. Carol knew the girl had problems but Wren was talking about her like she was the boogeyman.
"We didn't pick peaches," Mika admitted, "Lizzie made me go with her to feed that walker we saw stuck in the tracks. She caught a little field mouse..." Mika scrunched up her face in disgust leaving Carol to imagine what had become of the poor animal. She hoped that was the last of it but Mika continued on. "Lizzie was the one feeding rats to the walkers at the prison. She said if I told she would feed me to them instead."
TWD
Since Carol's words seemed to be falling on deaf ears when it came to Lizzie's problems with the walkers, she asked Tyreese if he might be willing to talk to her. The girl had been close with her father and Carol hoped she might be more responsive to a man than she was to Carol. While they spoke on the porch Carol watched Mika and Wren playing with Judith inside the cabin. Wren had the little girl in her lap and she was helping her to roll a ball back and forth with Mika. Everytime the colorful ball came at her Judith was giggling and squealing with delight.
Tyreese swung the door open. He looked half panicked and half excited. He stumbed over his words, telling Carol that he was sure he had heard voices coming from the direction of the train tracks. Carol hurried to grab her weapons, feeling a swell of hope surge up inside her.
"You girls stay here," she told them, directing her words to Wren since that's who she had deemed the most responsible of the bunch. Wren nodded as she leaped to her feet and swung Judith high into the air. She kissed the little girl and asked her which of their daddies she thought it was that Carol and Tyreese were about to find nearby. Lizzie was ushered back inside the cabin as Tyreese and Carol hurried away. Wren headed to the window and watched them until they disappeared into the woods.
"Maybe we should go outside," Lizzie suggested. While Wren wasn't to keen on listening to any ideas Lizzie came up with, heading outside to listen for her dad sounded too good to pass up. Mika grabbed one of the old quilts they found inside the cabin and the girls headed out te door. They lay the blanket down over the grass for Judith. Mika and Lizzie sat with her while Wren paced around with her hand on the gun at her hip. She hoped the voices Tyreese heard belonged to people they knew but Wren was smart enough to know that there was a chance the voices belonged to strangers. Maybe they were friendly, like the people that left the signs on the side of the railroad tracks but maybe they weren't.
"You're wrong about the walkers," Lizzie announced. Wren didn't dignify the girl's idiotic statement with a response other than to put her finger to her mouth signalling the other girl to shut the hell up. Wren was trying to listen for voices not to a bunch of lunatic walker garbage.
"You're all wrong and I'm going to prove it to you," Lizzie told her. Wren rolled her eyes. She knew Carol had said that Lizzie was sick and that they all needed to be nice to her but Wren was about at the limit of how much she was going to take from the girl.
"Go hug one then and see what happens," Wren suggested. She had already been mad about how Lizzie was treating Mika. And that was before she found out Lizzie was the one feeding the walkers at the prison. Wren's uncle and mom had both almost been bit fighting those walkers. Because they were bunching up on the fenceline. Because of Lizzie.
"I don't need to do that to show you," Lizzie said. Wren turned her back, determined to ignore the girl and not make anymore nasty remarks. But then she heard Mika scream. Wren turned to see that Lizzie had a knife in her hand. It looked like Tyreese's and Wren guessed Lizzie had lifted it off the man while he was talking to her on the porch.
Mika managed to dodge the first slash but the second one caught her across the side of her stomach. A large spot of bright red blood welled up on her side, soaking her shirt. Wren stood still for a moment not quite believing what she was seeing. She knew Lizzie was crazy but she still had not been expecting her to start trying to kill her sister out of nowhere. Mika was screaming and holding the bloody wound on her side. Lizzie held the knife up as she prepared to sink in into the other girl and finish her off. Wren felt the wind in her hair before she realized she was moving. Her body collided heavily with the other girl's sending them both crashing to the ground.
Wren had her fists balled up and she was pounding them into every part of Lizzie's body that she had access to. It took her a few minutes to even realize that the other girl wasn't fighting her back. Wren pulled back and looked down at herself. She was covered in blood and so was Lizzie. The thick dark liquid was pooling up under the girl, the large dark puddle getting wider and wider as it spread out across the grass.
Mika crawled over, one hand on her side. She grabbed for Wren with the other hand and pulled her away gently. It wasn't until Wren was back on the blanket that she saw the knife Lizzie had been holding. The hilt was sticking out of the middle of the other girl's chest. When Wren tackled her Lizzie had been stabbed with her own knife. She was dead.