Oh God! Sunday night! NO "Thank You!" Hang in there!
The heavy pounding drowns out their footfalls as they run. Not long after they'd started moving the sky broke open in great torrents upon them. Though it slows them some, the downpour agitates the walkers, stirring them from the stupors they'd long been lurking under. Without break the rain dumps down in mighty gusts that all day had been building. Water runs down Beth's and Daryl's faces, into their eyes, blurring their vision, and drips down their jaws. Their packs hang heavy from the extra weight, their water-logged clothes constrict and drag as they both fight to push their speed and keep ahead of what pursues them.
In the darkness, the light from their flashlights – broken and refracted in the downpour, does little to illuminate their path as they navigate the uneven and rocky terrain. Their route is black and wet before them, shifting with the storm – the shadowed movements materialize both into the gnashing clawing dead, and the benign rustling of the forest brush. Nothing is assuredly distinguishable in this deluge; the pair of them together run, and swerve, and duck, and when they must, bludgeon. Behind them stagger closer their pursuants, driving them forward through the mud and the muck and the unknown. Boots slosh and stick, but they keep up the pace, staying ahead of the walkers, and whatever else is out there. In a sudden flash the night lights up and the woods momentarily fill with white light and shadows before it again goes pitch. Thunder follows, crashing and close. The snarling mounts.
With crossbow upheld Daryl barrels forward, shifting his eyes forward and back, keeping tabs on their path, on Beth, and the walkers following them. Beth scrambles after him; weighted down though she is by the heft of her drenched pack, she exerts her will and pushes herself to keep up, to stay agile. They're wet and cold and winded; it's the second night now they haven't slept, but if their bodies are aching for shelter, warmth and a bed, it's their spirits that are truly plagued, tormented by the greater discomfort – the battle to survive, and the complex reconciling of surviving friends. The humid rain can hammer down on them all night, it's fear and grief that torture them.
They have nowhere to go, no cover to take; no prospects, no direction. They move on, letting the rain fall down on them, waiting for the worst of it to pass. Again the light flashes, briefly betraying a glimpse of another crowd of walkers. "Shit!" Daryl curses. They're being closed in on on two fronts. The dead seem to be advancing from nowhere.
"Daryl!"
"Stay tight—" They correct their heading and move forward, keeping their formation.
Through the rain they scramble over slopes and inclines, over rocks and brush and leaves and roots. Daryl keeps her ever ahead of him, keeping when he can one hand at her elbow to help her climb should she need it. She runs with gun in hand, knife ready at her hip, he with bow armed and raised. The herd swarms in pursuit, they seem to be closing in from every direction. Beth and Daryl keep their eyes ahead, training in on their escape paths, on the holes in the crowding hoards, on the routes of least resistance. They will themselves through, skirting what they can with speed and agility, taking down what is in their way, whatever gets too close. The night flashes with every round Beth fires.
Behind them they leave another makeshift home, another ad hoc future burned to ashes, another family lost. They move through violence away from violence, assuredly into further violence. Their feet move them practically by rote automation, this night's horrors have rendered them little more than automatons fighting to breathe – it is not faith or hope or love that pushes them on, it's raw survival. And though they are little themselves as they flee, still they work in unison, still they watch the other's back as their own. Still they are a pair.
Their bodies propel them forward, and wordlessly they leave behind that part of themselves they thought would stand and fight, that better self that would track down answers and those gone missing, that would stage a rescue. But some rescues come too late, and some cannot be saved, and if it hadn't been wrong to leave the fallen prison when they did and save themselves, then it cannot be wrong now — however horrible — to let that adrenaline in them push them forward away from danger: three lives, fighting for that next pump of the heart, the next influx of oxygen.
Daryl does not speak in the moments he pauses to fire a shot or reclaim a bolt or reload the bow; Beth is mute as she fires rounds into skulls. They run in league with each other, falling behind and catching up, providing coverage and extra eyes. They move, they battle, they flee, they breathe hard, and they run. They've been here before, this they can do. If they run, if they are quick, if they do not stop to breathe or think, they will make it out of this. Daryl pushes Beth ahead of him, up a craggy incline. "Climb!"
Beth runs, struggling to make it to the ridge. The downpour has not lessened, and it's flooding down the slopes in swift-moving channels; footing is difficult, but Beth manages. Behind her something claws at her and Beth twists back, firing a round into the hideous caved-in face of the rotting tearing figure lunging in too close to her. She'd slowed to take the shot, but she did not fully stop; the kickback, atop of the rain, atop the unsure footing, rob Beth of her balance; she loses her footing. Her momentum working now against her, she stumbles backward, catching her foot, then tumbles in one blurred tumult of action as her feet pull out from beneath her. Beth falls, slipping in the wet earth. So quickly does it happen, her body careens unnaturally through no doing of her own. She falls forward when she lands, hitting the wet earth hard.
Everything stops as the breath in her is knocked violently out. The impact was so sudden her vision temporarily goes black. In a silent stupor Beth's head rings; like the rest of her body the contents of her head had jogged hard as she'd hit the ground. And inside, along with her lungs and her stomach, something else shifted, tore. Daryl's in action immediately, swinging hard and bashing the crossbow into two snarling biters. He shoots another and then he's moving over her. She would lie there empty in her stunned stillness, fighting to recover some feeling of herself, but beyond her hazy blackness there is another fight being fought and through it Daryl's arm reaches down to yank her back to her feet and the skirmish; neither time nor circumstance allow her to sink away.
"Beth! Up!" he commands, tugging her forcibly to her feet and into a run. He'd dispatched three walkers in the short time since her fall but it did little to thin out the attack and they have got to move now if there is to be any chance of breaking through.
With the end tips of her reaching fingers Beth manages to grasp and keep hold of the pistol she'd let fall from her hands when her body hit hard the tangled ground cover of roots and rocks. With weapon recovered but little else including her breath, Beth follows at a brisk speed, allowing her foreign feeling body to be pushed and pulled through a treacherous web of woods and slopes and trees and walkers. There is no chance for arrow recovery as they tear through the forest — Daryl hardly has the opportunity to reload, and he must be running low. Beth stumbles over the legs that move faster than she does.
Involuntarily she stops, she cannot continue forward at this pace. Daryl's deep voice reaches her through the chaos— "We gotta move, Beth." He pulls on her arm and pushes her ahead of him by the shoulder.
They manage to travel some distance further before Beth goes immobile. "I'h can't," she pants. "I'h have to stop. I don't know what's happenin' – I have to stop." She does stop. "I have to stop," she repeats as she sinks into silence.
Daryl stands over her, his eyes flashing, this way and that, keeping watch, straining to listen for walkers through the rain and the ruckus. His breath is heavy and comes fast; like hers his chest heaves at a quick pace. Daryl affords a brisk glance in her direction, "Talk to me." He gives her a moment but when no response comes he prompts her again. "You okay? Talk to me." Daryl watches as she just sits there, cradling herself. "You been scratched? Bit? Beth!"
Beth has no words to voice the fear inside her.
Daryl's body winces as he looks at her. "Sorry, Beth. We can't stop here." Weighted by the rain and his pack, Daryl stoops to lift her up, and limply she gives in to her body being moved. For some distance as they start again Daryl half carries half supports Beth, being the weight and the will to move her when she cannot summon it from within.
In time, as the rain continues to hammer into her face, stinging her skin with each tiny hard-falling drop, Beth comes-to a little. Her small frozen hand finds his arm. "I c'n do it." And from her feet the strength to lift each leg in front of the other comes back to her. First at a walking pace, then again at a run. The woods are dangerous. Their vision is impaired – even with the aid of the goggles, their hearing is crippled, there are walkers afoot, and there is no there to get to. No sanctuary. Nothing physical to try for.
As they run into the unknown, away from what's been rendered another past, Beth has no vision of finding others. She has no hope in her to find community. She shuts herself down, to the pain and discomfort of her physical body, as does she to the terrible pain of loss.
Two is enough – Daryl and the baby. Beth shuts out every thought but this: as her muscles move her, as her bones uphold her, the steps she takes echo one thing, pound it into the earth, into her blood, Daryl and the baby. Two is enough. She has two hands to hold on with, two eyes to keep watch with. She can keep these two she tells herself. She wills it to be true. These two. It's occurring to her maybe two is all she can have, if she's not to have those she loves ripped from her again. Two. These two. That is what she'll hold to: Daryl and their baby, all the while ever yearning for and longing for the families she's lost.
Beth had wanted people, when she and Daryl had walked days on end in the woods. She hadn't expected it, but she'd wanted them to find a place, people to settle in with. They'd found some - the best they maybe could have, but now that's over. And every stride Beth takes strengthens the lesson the world keeps hammering down so relentlessly upon her: You cannot keep the people you love. So she's circling in, and the love she has left is being closely guarded.
Her body aches, she cannot breathe but somehow distance is sill being covered underfoot. They have not stopped; she knows this, but she does not feel it. She's gone numb, her fingers, her legs, her face, her heart, all save for one flicker of warmth she's holding fast to, deep inside, guarded by scar tissue. Beth does not cry.
The families she's lost, the homes that have been destroyed, those were not her fault; it was never a case of not loving well enough, not taking care enough, but to build it all up again to have it all torn to shreds again? She won't. She can't. She cannot survive it. There is a critical mass of the dead they cannot battle and survive, so too is there for heartbreak. To see Michael was to see her mother, Shawn, Patricia, Jimmy. To see James was to once more see the blade hack violently into her father's neck. It was losing Lori, it was not finding the kids at the end of their tracks. And the others, the not knowing, amplifies the silent absence of the first family lost to them, Maggie and Glenn, and Rick, and Carl, and Michonne and Carol. Everyone. One loss mounts upon the shoulders of the others. She can't bear another loss. Daryl and the baby. That's it.
Beth resigns herself to endless days on the road. She'll guard herself with no home, no creature comforts, cold nights and heated days, sunburns, bug bites, and exhaustion, all of it, all to keep from losing one more home; all to keep this essential family going. Herself, Daryl, the baby.
Herself, Daryl, the baby. It will be the rhythm of her footsteps over the hard trodden dusty roads ahead.
Herself, Daryl, the baby. It will be the rhythm of her heartbeat when she runs or fights.
Herself, Daryl, the baby. It will be the blood that courses through her still-living veins. It will pound in her head when she falls asleep, it will be the inner alarm that wakes her so often in the nights and finally at the break of day.
Herself, Daryl, the baby. There will be no room for anything else.
If there comes anything else to them as they travel, as they move, it will fall to Daryl to carry it with them. Any hope for anything more than just them three living and breathing, it will be he who holds it and feeds it. Any faith that things will work out, it's Daryl who will have to keep it. He will do this for himself, he will do this for the unborn child, he will do this for her, until Beth again can do it for herself.