Chapter 15 – Breathe
Breathe, Stevie told herself, eyes closed and face smooshed into Bruno's fur, pulling his warm bulk toward her and away from the hazy daylight and putrid air coming through the open sliver of the trunk of a random car on a random highway while random corpses shuffled past. To keep from losing her entire damn mind, she tried to convince it that everything was fine, that everyone had found cover and would be smart enough to stay still and quiet until the danger passed.
She refocused onto a head count, or as much of one as she could accomplish after having been stuffed in a trunk by a soon-to-be-dead Dixon.
Breathe, the mantra repeated. Start with the positives and what you know for sure.
Gavin, Hazel, and Andre were safe on the roof of the RV. Dale was with them, and although Stevie didn't like the nosy old man, he would slit his own throat before letting a kid die on his watch.
Jenner, Jacqui, and Andrea had been and presumably still were inside the RV. After his "We're all infected" revelation had been met with Stevie's utterly unimpressed "Yeah, I know" and stone-cold promise to shank him if he didn't quit trying to get himself killed (or something like that), the doctor had reverted to blankness. Stevie wasn't quite sure why Jacqui had chosen to hover over him. She was kind of religious, right? Maybe she wanted to keep him from offing himself and save his precious little soul. Or, well, she was definitely kind of high-strung about the latest development in God's plan, so maybe she just wanted to pester Jenner for more info. And Andrea… jeez, the useless woman had chosen to tinker with her gun at a time when almost everyone else was up and working, when having a functional weapon would've been helpful.
Hmm. Scratch that. Andrea likely would've been popping off rounds already and getting herself and others killed.
Note to self: steal or otherwise sabotage Soap Box Barbie's gun.
Regardless, as long as the trio stayed still and quiet, they'd be fine. Well, if one of them remembered to shut the RV door, which had been wide open to let in the breeze, despite Stevie's passing advice that "If you're not gonna pay attention to your surroundings, you'd best put something solid between them and you."
Rick had been the one to run past and alert the group, hissing at them all to get down, to get under the cars. And despite Stevie's very thorough safety lecture, Amy had done so, whimpering in terror. Stevie had been too busy preventing Carl from doing the same, literally picking the boy up by the back of his pants (emergency wedgie style) and stuffing him into the trunk he'd just been poking through. Itching to rush ahead to be with her sister, she'd lingered to make sure he tied the trunk mostly shut like she'd showed him.
It had been long enough for Merle to sneak up and give Stevie the exact same treatment, hoisting her by the jeans and then tipping her headfirst into the next free trunk.
Dizzy and flailing to untangle her limbs (and wiggle her underwear out of her butt crack), the teen had barely remembered not to shriek in outrage at having her own strategy used against her. "Merle!" she'd snarled, her voice melding with Bruno's low warning growl while she'd struggled to right herself.
"Call him off and get him in there with ya," the gruff man had ordered, voice uncharacteristically soft and solemn and blue eyes blazing fiercely against the lurid scarlet of his still raw, scabby sunburn. He'd crouched low and kept watch on the incoming herd, cutting off her attempt at complaining with "Now, damn it!"
"Sophia-"
"I'll get her," he'd sworn. There'd been an aborted attempt to shove the teen back down, held off by Bruno's mounting fury and pointed snap of jaws, but Merle had insisted, "Ain't got time ta argue!"
Reluctant, queasy and terrified and regretting everything since waking that morning, Stevie had given in. She'd called Bruno into the trunk and, hands shaking, reached over him to tie it down into the mostly shut position. Merle had stayed only long enough to ensure that she'd secured herself and her doggo and to jiggle the car to test that said trunk wouldn't be popping open.
And then she'd had nothing to do but wait and attempt to ignore the shuffling and grunting and reeking of the river of dead.
Breathe.
Right. Head count. Merle was… Merle was with Sophia. Or else.
Breathe.
Stevie was going to kill him. Kill him. She was going to find the nastiest horse trough in Georgia and hold his empty head under the water until the bubbles stopped. She was going to feed him feet first into a woodchipper, with numerous breaks to lecture him on all his wrongdoings. She was going to pray for a meteor to hit him directly in the dick.
Breathe.
Daryl was as sneaky as his brother and had various silent weapons at his disposal. Stevie had no doubt that wherever he was, he was totally fine. Probably even saving other campers from themselves.
Breathe.
Michonne had lingered close to the RV, never out of range to hear if Andre called for her. She was smart and had a silent weapon as well as the means and knowledge to secure herself in a trunk.
Breathe.
Shane had been… messing around with the water truck? No, he'd progressed to messing around in a random engine (and briefly bickering with Lori about throuple business?), for some idiotic reason that had nothing to do with actually helping Merle, Glenn, and Jim while they'd tried to scrounge the parts to fix the RV and then complete said fixing. Perhaps Merle had stowed Glenn and Jim somewhere safe before coming to assault Stevie, but there was little chance that Shane had been given any such consideration. Whether or not the cop's bulky frame and massive ego would fit underneath the car he'd been working on was anyone's guess. Maybe he'd still been at the water truck after all. He'd be fine if that was the case. Plenty of room.
Breathe.
Who else? Um… Fuck, it was hard to think while geeks shambled past and occasionally bounced off the car like Roombas used to mindlessly bounce off furniture… Oh, T-Dog! Oh. Oh no. He was a nice guy but clumsy. He wasn't fat by any means but maybe too thick to comfortably slide underneath the average car. And he hadn't stuck around long enough to listen to Stevie's lecture about safely hiding in a trunk. She hoped he'd found a viable alternative.
That left just Lori and Carol. They'd been the farthest ahead, searching aimlessly and probably commiserating about Stevie's attitude problem. The pair had been with Sophia. They had better still be with Sophia and not let her out of their sight until Stevie could rejoin her sister.
(Then again, Lori vacillated between smothering and ignoring her own kid and didn't tend to give a crap about anyone else's unless there was some nose-in-the-air demanding or scolding or disparaging to do. And Carol… Even after everything, Stevie wanted to trust her mother. It was just that years of experience told the teen that doing so was almost certain to end in disappointment. And disappointment during the apocalypse translated to gross bodily harm and/or horrific death by undead cannibal freaks.)
Breathe.
Hell, who was Stevie kidding? It was all her fault. She'd known better than to let Sophia go anywhere alone with Carol, even (or especially) with Lori contributing her dubious supervision, but hadn't given more than a token protest, solely because the teen hadn't wanted to fight anymore. Had been exhausted at the thought of it. But fighting was what Stevie was good at, wrangling morons toward decent behavior and nondestructive choices, so why had she shirked that duty? And how had the teen missed the incoming herd?! She'd been doing 360-degree checks what felt like every five minutes, but maybe they'd still been too far away for her or Bruno to discern when Rick had come barreling through. She needed buckets of geek guts to keep on hand and drench herself and her reluctant cohort with at any sign of danger.
Breathe.
You fucked up. Pray your fuckup doesn't kill anyone. Do better next time, if you even get a next time.
Breathe.
Fuckup. Killer. Failure.
Breathe.
Somehow, in all the sudden chaos and impotent rage, Stevie's damaged psyche had cycled through her most prominent triggers and, not finding traction, had moved on to lesser ones.
Oh, HEY! Confined dark space! Good luck staying quiet with a horribly timed panic attack!
There was still some corner of her mind that insisted silence equaled safety, that no matter what was happening, drawing attention meant pain. And that probably saved her worthless life.
Breathe.
God fucking damn it. Why couldn't she breathe?!
By the time a living person came to knock on the trunk and give the all-clear, Bruno, all one hundred fifty pounds of him, was fully on top of Stevie, doing a task he hadn't needed to in years.
xxxxxxxxxx
Ta-da. In case the last part wasn't clear, Bruno is doing deep pressure therapy (DPT). If you don't know what that is, look it up. I'm not your maid. Anyway, guesses on the campers' various fates? Was it an exciting chapter, despite the fact that Stevie spent the entirety of it inside a trunk? Let me know what you think on those and other topics, please :)