A shadow in the Night
Joel had noticed her from his very first night in Jackson's bar. A lone, thin, small figure with long, brown hair curling over her shoulders, sat at the far, dark corner of the room, swirling a glass of bourbon every Friday, a mirror image of him. She wasn't as old as him. She wasn't very young either. She was one of those who were already adults when the world ended, probably just barely but she was.
Every evening, some passing by her would stop and speak to her very briefly. She would mutter a response. They would leave her alone. Every so often, she'd scan the room, her green eyes giving nothing away. Sometimes, he was sure that her stare landed on him when he wasn't looking. She would disappear the moment the pub got even more people, just like him.
"Who is she?" he asked Tommy finally.
"You have quite the radar, Joel", his younger brother snorted, "Out of all these people you are asking about the only person that probably has as much to hide as you."
He was hiding that he had doomed the world to more of this hell. He doubted that she had 'as much to hide'. Of course he wouldn't say that. He just looked at his drink.
"Her name is Lilah," Tommy carried on, pronouncing the name with an i sound, "We found her four years ago."
"Found her?"
"Yeah… She should have been in a group. We found two of them dead. Then we found her a mile or so further. We thought that she was dead, too, when Maria realised she still had a pulse. We brought her over. She survived. She is good with her hands. She is reliable on patrol. She keeps to herself. She stayed. Maria felt sorry for her, whatever…"
"You seem to disagree with your wife."
"They were raiders."
"And?"
"The one dead was bitten, but hadn't turned yet and the other, no."
"You don't know the circumstances."
"Finally, you and your sister-in-law agree on something. To me, Joel? They were just a bunch of criminals who had found an excuse to turn against each other. She could have been the victim as much as the one who started it. Till the moment her body hit the ground that woman was another one 'who did those things to keep themselves alive'."
Tommy used to do that. Hell, so did he. What was the difference? They didn't do it anymore. He wanted to push it but decided against it. Joel was the very last person to talk about changing his ways, not after what he did in that hospital. Tommy couldn't hate himself or his own family that much, anyway. Things could be easier to process if he could project his disdain to someone else. That lone woman, who apparently made no effort to make people like her and kept everything to herself, was an easy target. The interesting part was that Maria had actually kept her. Well, she had also married Tommy. She disliked Joel, but she had kept him around, too.
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