For a moment they remain there, immobile and defeated, but even that is a luxury they no longer can afford and Daryl's voice, heavy, gnarled, and prostrate, breaks their miserable torpor. "G't up. Beth, get up." Daryl rises to his feet pulling Beth with him. Wincing at the pain in her back, she struggles a moment for balance then moves in the direction of her knife. When Daryl moves in another direction the line binding them together pulls and keeps them in place. "Whut're y' doin'?"
"Daryl, we gotta get the knife."
"Knife's not fast 'nough f'r this, better t' make for the car, use the fender as a saw."
"It's dark, if we don't get the knife now we won't be able t' find it."
Daryl exhales; why is she the one thinking clearly? He jerks his head in agreement. They move to the knife, lower themselves, and Daryl grasps it. He tries to angle it in position to cut them loose but the hilt gets in the way and in the end, they do use the fender. Once loose, Beth accepts the knife when he hands it over to her, then watches as Daryl then tears off a huge strip from his shirt and wraps it tightly around a large shard of glass he breaks free from one of the shattered windows. He looks around, ready to act, but the night, and the flames, and the still far-off walkers are closing in on them and—
"FUUUCK!" Daryl roars. In anguish, he moves to kick the car tire but barefoot in his holey socks thinks better of it before he makes contact and likey breaks his toes. So cowed, he collapses against the trunk, dropping his forehead down upon his fists. Beth watches him in silence. The desolation of Daryl Dixon is deafening. He remains there, unmoving, his muscles tensed but with absolutely no action to take.
"Daryl. Daryl?" But he does not look up, doesn't register he's heard her. "What do we do?" Beth looks about her hurriedly, scanning the buildings, scanning the woods in the distance, scanning the mass of walkers advancing slowly in the distance. "Daryl — do we take cover?" Her eyes keenly take in their surroundings. "The fire won't reach the structures further toward the outskirts…" She grips her knife and keeps her eyes peeled. "Should we head for the woods? Circle back t' the direction th' herd's comin' from, get behind them?" She looks down at him, "Daryl!"
"Can't stay in town," he speaks dully. Pulling himself up, Daryl rises, "Com'on." He tugs at her elbow and leads her at a running pace off the street, down side streets and residential alleys, away from the fires and the advancing herd. But once safe Beth stops, and thus compelled Daryl does as well, and there, with labored breath and adrenaline still racing from their ambush, temporarily sheltered from the ensuing melee up the road, the two of them regroup and endeavor to construct a plan of action.
Catching his breath, trying to recover himself, Daryl isn't looking at her. He hasn't been looking at her. What he has is broken glass for a weapon. That's how precarious and fragile a spot they're in. "Beth," he urges her, "we gotta keep going."
Five walkers stumble round and come at them from around the corner, opposite of the herd's approach. With lethal immediacy, Daryl moves into action. Pulling one close to him by the remnants of its hair, unwittingly pulling off half the scalp with it in the process, Daryl jabs his shard of glass through its eye. When the glass won't retract when he pulls back on it, he abandons the impromptu weapon and with sharp eyes looks madly for something at his disposal with which to arm himself, pushing an oncoming walker away from him as he does. There is nothing — no stray piece of metal or wood, nothing to use, no boots to stomp with, nothing with which to pummel or bludgeon, gouge or impale. Meanwhile, Beth is stabbing at one that's on her. Fending it off, she drives her blade through with singular force. The thing falls and Beth readies her blade again as she returns to formation. Still empty-handed, Daryl takes hold of a walker by the back of its jacket and swings it wildly, driving it headfirst into the protruding branch of a tree. It stays there stuck against the branch as it quivers and dies. Daryl pulls a thrashing female off of Beth, who herself is fighting back another, and drags it flailing to an iron porch railing, slamming its head again and again against the railing till the face and skull all but disappear. Consumed by too-long deferred rage, a mad rush of violence courses through him and with blind momentum Daryl moves back to Beth, snatches quickly the knife from her black-bloodied hands, and violently ends the final walker in her stead. When all five are dispatched he looks about feverishly, ready for more. Detecting no immediate threat, he flips the hilt in an impressively quick maneuver and with a primal nod of finality hands the knife back over to Beth. When all is seemingly still in their immediate vicinity, they scan their surroundings once more, and when no dead are visible, Daryl retreats to some immobile despondent darkness within himself and Beth drops to the ground.
If Daryl'd expected to see her cry or give way to some wave of crushing emotion he'd have been wrong. As Daryl had been just moments before, Beth is all action: frantically she searches the corpses' bodies. Rifling through pockets, she scours for anything of use they can get their hands on. Nothing. Wallets. Keys. Watches. No weapons. No food. There's jewelry, but nothing else. Still, Beth pockets the one unbroken lens from a pair of glasses one of them wears; maybe it might help to start a fire at some point.
"Don't bother," he mutters.
She flashes a look at him but does not stop. Daryl's head aches from the strike he took to it, but far worse than the physical blow is the toll this run-in's taken on his mindset. His instinct to survive in the face of immediate danger is not deteriorated — he is not so incapacitated he won't act when he has to, but anything more is beyond him at present. Looming too large is this latest trauma. He can only see it, and what's directly before them: abject futility. Anything past now, be it the need for supplies, the reality that once they retreat to the woods they'll be empty-handed for sure, or the absence of an assured route out, is too much. But Beth is not so afflicted; she has sprung into action, and after the pockets, she moves on to their feet. One is barefoot, his feet shredded and missing toes. Another wears ballet flats, too impractical and filled with rank goo to trouble with. The one impaled against the tree is shod in the bloody, oozing shreds of what formerly had been canvas shoes, while the other pairs measure much too small for Daryl and not nearly small enough for her; what's more, the holes and separated treads render the footwear less than worthwhile.
"Klaank! Blaankk! Klaank!"
Beth looks up from her task to find Daryl single-mindedly banging a rock against the porch railing, trying to break free an iron posting. Though he can't get it, still he keeps hammering with fierce and unrelenting intensity. Beth stops and watches him. He is not himself. He's going to draw them to them with all the noise he's making.
"Daryl," she speaks steadily as she rises and tries with her soft, quiet Beth voice to break through to him. "It's all right. They're gone — we're alive."
"We're not alive," he mutters coldly, stopping his banging and letting the rock fall dead from his hand. "We j'st ain't dead yet."
"Don't say that."
"We got nothin'," he erupts. "We got a knife, that's it. We ain't got shoes, we ain't got artillery, we ain't got a chance."
"We'll get shoes," she says evenly, keeping her eyes on their surroundings as much as on him. "That's easy," she assures, disregarding she just came up short on that front a second earlier. "We'll find weapons; we've done it before."
"Yeah?" he looks at her sharply. "Just how much d'you think is out there? Folks like us an' assholes like them an' the Governor 've been stockpiling ev'ry piece they find f'r the past two years."
"We'll find some. Maybe not a bow… " In the darkness descending upon them — both actual and incorporeal — she feels compelled to add, "For a while at least." Beth looks at him, his head hanging down, his fists still clenched, all fight seemingly drained out of him, "… Com'on—" She doesn't touch him; he couldn't abide it if she tried. At the moment, as demoralized as he is, Daryl is beaten down and bleakly alone. Not even allowing her eyes to fall too long in his direction, Beth treads lightly, though in the time frame they have they can't afford for her to do so long. "We gotta move."
"Why?" he presses combatively. "Ev'ry place 's as bad as this. It don't matter."
"It does matter. … Eventually, you'll remember that. And I'm not gonna let you die in th' meantime. … We gotta get off the street; look for some supplies."
"We can't stay here, Beth."
"We can search these houses," she insists. "Go back to those shops. We didn't even scratch the surface—"
"Look around, this town's been picked over already but good. We ain't got time t' spare to go searchin' f'r what's been long gone. We gotta go."
"Daryl, if we don't try now it'll be too late. If we try the places away from the fires, we might have ti—"
"Beth— we stick around? It won't matter what we find, we'll never get out. We don't got close to th' numbers t' fight our way out of a herd; we'll be swarmed. This is our out, we gotta take it." Daryl jerks his head for her to follow then walks stealthily, recovered rock in hand, toward the woods. With reservation, first looking back behind her at the forsaken town, Beth follows after at a quick pace. It wouldn't be her plan, but he is moving.
When Daryl stops to knock loose and pull out a sprinkler post, Beth leans against an old rusted-out car and brushes the gravel off the bottoms of her feet. "The herd's comin' from that direction, but the gunshots and the flames will draw all the walkers in the area, there's no one direction—"
Daryl tries the weight of the pipe in his hand, it's solid, and he's thankful it isn't plastic. "Then we'll fight our way through. We ain't stayin'." And at his signal they start to run, only to confront another cluster of walkers. In their first unified act since leaving that bedroom, what now seems days ago, Beth and Daryl take formation. Backs to each other, they raise their weapons and ready. Daryl strikes first, crushing an already mangled head in with the pipe. Beth makes three stabs and takes out a large one-armed walker furiously clawing and gnashing at her. Another, Daryl holds off him while Beth drives the knife in and up through the back of its neck. His adrenaline pumping, Daryl knocks off the hanging fender from the old car and, hoisting it, bashes the heads of the remaining two, knocking them to the asphalt. Using the fender, Daryl pins them down and takes them out with Beth whilst kneeling over them on the ground. And then they run. Socked feet run over gravel, asphalt, and broken glass, then pine needles, rocks, and sticklers as they cross over into the woods. They're breathing hard, watching as hulking lumbering shadows move against the outline of the burning town center. Their hearts won't stop racing. His head throbs from where the gun struck him and she's having trouble staying upright feeling the pain from the mighty blow to her back, but they cannot succumb.
Daryl tugs Beth to follow. They've got to keep moving, got to cover more ground, but Beth pulls back, resisting his prompting. She looks back at the town. The outskirts from which they'd just fled are still mostly untouched. Unless the wind shifts dramatically, the fire won't reach them, and the walkers are migrating to the flames, inward into the town. She can't easily just leave it all behind when they have nothing. "We could at least look for some gasoline."
"Beth," he asks wearily, walking away in the continuance of their endless exodus, "what're we gonna do with gas?" She looks at him— Hadn't they always been on the lookout for gas? Hadn't that been a part of the larger plan from the start? By this point, it's become a rote reflex to check for it. "Where are we goin' in a hurry? Where is there t' go?" Beth stops short. It isn't his ire that's thrown her, nor his argued position; arguably, it might likely take longer than they've got to locate and hotwire a still-fuelled car. What's shocked her is this defeatist cynicism.
She looks at him, motionless, and utterly betrayed. "You're giving up?" The real wound here is not his dejection, she trusts that will pass. It isn't the dismissal of said hypothetical vehicle, nor not fortifying themselves with whatever they can (which they should be doing, and fast). It's much larger than that. Since the prison, there has been between them, she had thought, the unspoken mission to find and reconnect with the group, with whomever among them is still alive and out there. Their travels, their walking, their ceaseless journeying was, in part, a tactical measure of survival, but it was also more than that, she'd thought. All that time she'd been searching for family. To hear him rate it all now as aimless and without a purpose is to her near treasonous.
"We c'n make it on our own, Beth," he tells her wearily, meaning it as some kind of meager assurance and comfort. "Looking f'r th' others…" He never puts words to the rest of the thought, he doesn't think he has to.
"You don't know that."
"Oh, I don't?" he lashes out at her, swinging the pipe in her face. "Whut was that?" he growls, flinging his arm back to where they'd been taken down. "You wanna go out there lookin' f'r more of that? 'Cuz that's whut we're gonna find. And them, those assholes we just got taken by, they won't be the worst. Not nearly!" Beth watches him grow dark before her. His eyes flash sharply to her. "What they said? 'Bout you? T'weren't wrong. It is dangerous out here for you."
"It's dangerous out here for all of us."
"No," he smolders, "I mean, espec'ly for you. An' I don't mean cuz'f your bein' small." He blinks as he looks at her face as he says these things to her, her river eyes watching him as he breaks down the realities of a hyper-masculine world he thinks she doesn't already know about. "Beth, there are men out there who'll want to hurt you, who'll hurt me t' get at you. Who'll take pleasure in breaking you."
His words hurt, but Beth makes the conscious effort then to break a smile. And there, as misplaced as it may be amidst the grime and the sweat and the blood and plain fear across her face, the deliberateness of it dazzles in its effort at defiance. It's not against him that she's pushing back but the world with which he's trying to frighten her, the nebulous threat he's hanging over her head as the reason for them not to go on. "So?"
"'So?" he fumes. Provoked by her bullheadedness, the aggravation he's feeling toward her is so strong he could nearly throttle her, except that the thing he's trying most to do is protect her. Alarmed by the ferocity he's unleashing, Daryl quits talking. Through gritted teeth, he exhales, but he isn't through with his campaign to break down that quixotic obstinacy. He leans in close, hoping maybe that his intense proximity to her will shake her from her delusion. "We gotta play it safe." He's practically glaring at her with misplaced aggression. "I can't lose you."
"So, you're being selfish?" That isn't Daryl. It isn't them. She's not settling for a life lived in retreat with no room for the rest of the world, even as it literally burns around them. But Daryl isn't in the mood for her probing plays with rhetoric.
"Goddamnit, girl," he lets burst, "use your damned fool head!"
"Daryl!" she shouts back. "Stop shouting at me! This isn't my fault!" Daryl flinches, then visually breaks out of his fury. "We gotta get a plan," she says, resuming her natural tenor. "Daryl, we c'n go after them." In this moment she doesn't mean their family. If Daryl needs his bow and a win this badly, they can redress the indignities they were made to suffer. They can reclaim what is theirs, if that's what he needs.
"With what?" he rages at her. Her intrepidness will get her killed one day. "Beth, if we couldn't take 'em when we were armed—" he doesn't even bother finishing the thought, she should be thinking more clearly. Smarter. Safer.
"We'd have them by surprise—"
"What do you think this is? A damn movie? 'We'll make it just 'cuz we're th' good guys?' We're not going t' make it. We never were. All this—" he waves his arm meaning everything they've shared and built together in the woods "—'s just a stop-gap. A death rattle. Beth, this is it. We're here, we got t' the end. Look around. Dudn't look like what you expected? Wull guess what? There never was no finish line. You fight until you can't fight no more an' then you die. We was never anything any different. There weren't no better life we was gonna get to. Wanna know what all that walking was for? All those miles for all those weeks? Nothin'. We were never going nowhere and was never gonna get there. We was always heading right here." He leans in to intimidate, "Better get your head right with that."
"No."
"'No'?"
"No. Even if we were never heading anywhere, it doesn't matter. Walking kept us alive."
"Walking got us here."
"Then let's get outta here."
"Girl, every place you go is here."
Beth convulses through too many reactions at once. She wants to impale him with words and her fists. She wants to bully him and laugh at him and slap him, just to break through. But she doesn't. Daryl's turned against himself already, she can't join in. But neither can she save him or get through to him. Not yet. He'll have to do it himself. She feels they should get what they can while they are able, but more so she needs him to fight — not physically, innately he'll always do that. There is much more to survival than staying alive and she needs him to fight for that, because she's starting to see that will, that distinctive hope in him fade, as though it were one more thing he'd shrugged off and surrendered to the bandits. In moments of inaction, he's hardly there, weighted down by hindsight, and regret, and cynical ambivalence.
"Fine," she lets drop coldly. "Should we lie down in the road and wait for death? Is it fate? We could have let them do it, done us a favor according to you." She looks at him, waiting for some kind of response. "No? Fine." And Beth turns and walks, venturing further into the woods, abandoning her hope and desire for what might still wait for them in town, but holding ever tightly to her Hope and to her greatest desire: to Live.
Since she'd stalked off to find booze in their early days on the run, Beth never pictured herself ever walking away from Daryl Dixon again, but if he kept them going in the days after the prison fell, it's falling on her to keep them going now. Daryl can't sink into apathy. He can be sad and self-pitying, but he can't not care if he lives or dies. If she walks away he'll follow, and in following — in motion and in action, and in forging a forward path — he'll find himself again.
Daryl does follow, and so they walk, knife in her hand, pipe in his, moving swiftly into the woods, into the night, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the socks on their feet, Daryl's indefatigable instincts, and Beth's inextinguishable faith.