Chapter 16 – The Butcher's Bill
Jim was dead.
Stevie had seen that coming a mile off but lamented the loss, especially the way it had happened.
Poor Glenn.
His black eye was evidence that he'd attempted to keep Jim from sprinting headlong into the incoming horde.
Maybe Jim had been nobly trying to buy the rest of them time. Maybe Jim had been hallucinating, trapped in a PTSD episode or flashback, reliving the moment he'd lost his own family, choosing to sacrifice himself as he'd clearly wished to weeks ago. Maybe Jim had just been utterly done after Jenner's revelation and had leapt into death at the jagged hands and teeth of the animated corpses, knowingly committing suicide by undead cannibals in a gory fit of guilt and grief and nihilism.
Jim had died without a bang, with barely a whimper, pointlessly, either luckily or unluckily silenced by rotten chompers ripping out his throat before even more rotten chompers started tearing apart the rest of him.
RIP Jim. We hardly knew ye. We had no idea what to do with the stringy, bloody bits that were left of ye. We redistributed ye's stuff. (Jesus HVAC Christ, did ye really need that many condoms?)
Note to self: Do not ever agree to give a eulogy.
Glenn's other black eye, much more swollen and purple, and bloody mouth and gnarly concussion were, paradoxically, evidence that Merle wasn't as heartless as he seemed. Like Stevie, Glenn had needed to be fished out of a trunk that Merle had stuffed him into. Unlike Stevie, Glenn had not gone quietly (futilely attempting to chase Jim and presumably stop his suicide run) or been afforded an air vent (there had been no handy pipe-and-paracord contraption at hand or a conscious person inside the trunk to tie it properly). Still, Glenn had been only half-dead from heat stroke rather than all-dead by walkers by the time the remnants of the group found him, so… win?
Even knowing that Merle never would've hit her (while he was mostly sober), even knowing that throwing the sort of fit that would've tempted him to hit her would've gotten everyone killed, Stevie felt immensely guilty about ultimately submitting to and eventually emerging unscathed from her involuntary confinement. If Merle hadn't forced the issue, Stevie never would've hidden.
Stevie would've sprinted ahead and wrapped herself around her sister. If escaping into the woods had become necessary, then at least Stevie would've been with Sophia.
Instead, Merle was with Sophia.
Lost in the woods.
Forget poison ivy in his underwear. Merle would be lucky if Stevie managed to source fire ants before a cottonmouth.
Ok. Ok. Ok.
So.
One dead.
One thrashed.
Two missing.
The Harrison sisters were engaged in matching mental breakdowns, Amy fragile after cowering totally alone under a car while the herd shuffled past, Andrea keyed up after cowering in the RV bathroom while a walker wandered into said RV and was messily (somehow, utterly surprisingly) dispatched by Jacqui and Jenner.
Yeah, about that… Jacqui wore a thousand-yard stare, and Jenner appeared kind of invigorated, watching the dazed woman like she was a firefly in a jar, like he was gleefully anticipating the right conditions to paint his blood-splattered face with her glowing innards.
Stevie would circle back to that. It was weird, and she had a bad feeling. But at the moment, she also had much bigger issues to handle.
The most immediate concern, after the fact that Sophia had needed to flee into the woods due to Carol's and Lori's disgusting failure at caretaking, was T-Dog's nasty gash.
Giggity.
No. Stop it. Bad Stevie. Not the time.
"Tourniquet," the teen snapped, clumsily scrambling to remove her own belt and its various attachments when no one else leapt to action. And why was she doing that? Why was she wasting time not chasing her sister?
Because Rick had chased her, slower than Merle, but at least that meant there were two grown men willing to die for Sophia, assuming they were with her at all. Well, Merle was. Probably. (Or fucking else.) The descriptions were spotty, but both useless mothers had agreed that he'd been just a few steps behind the girl when she'd been forced to flee. And even if Stevie left at that moment, the likelihood of finding her sister when the younger girl and her entourage had at least a ten-minute head start was slim to none. So, Stevie had been convinced to not put herself in danger as well, to give the three missing members time to return before she panicked and went after Sophia and possibly got herself lost, too.
(Stevie didn't like that plan, but she could at least recognize the logic in it.)
"Can you walk?" Stevie asked T, not bothering to react to his snarl of pain when she mercilessly cinched the arteries in his bleeding arm. After he nodded wearily, she motioned for Daryl to help her drag him up and then to Jenner. It quickly became clear that Daryl was doing most of said dragging, so Stevie jogged ahead to alert the doctor and search through the jumble of bags looted from the CDC for IV supplies, suture kits, bandages, antibiotics, and painkillers; those items and more should've been plentiful, if Rick hadn't blown up all the med bags. The group hadn't had time for inventory and organization of the haul, so most of it was still packed and crammed into the Humvee and RV.
Luckily for T-Dog, Stevie found what she was looking for in the former location and rushed back to see that he'd been splayed out in the shade of the latter's awning, sharing a blowup mattress with Glenn, who had an instant icepack held to his pummeled face. Both were the picture of misery (especially considering that T hadn't fully recovered from the time Merle had beaten him up in Atlanta).
One dead.
One thrashed.
Three missing.
Two doing some kind of synchronized catatonic crying thing.
Two acting shifty as hell.
One partially filleted.
Thankfully, all the rest of the kids were fine, including Carl. He wasn't particularly happy that Stevie had stuffed him in a trunk, but after seeing how Merle had handled Glenn, the boy didn't bother complaining. The three youngest hadn't even woken from their afternoon naps, and Stevie had no intention of allowing them down from the roof of the RV until the convoy was ready to roll out.
Which would not be happening until Sophia was back.
Michonne had switched with Dale to sit sentry on said roof. While the old man fluttered around the blond sisters and Jenner tended to T-Dog (though managed to devote the majority of his attention to Jacqui), Stevie paced restlessly and stayed far the hell away from her mother while she sobbed in Lori's arms about the walkers after her baby.
The more details that emerged from the incident, the more distance Stevie needed to stop herself from throttling the pair. It wasn't just that Carol and Lori had let Sophia wander far enough away from them that the girl had been under a car alone (hidden from Merle when he'd come to try to find her). It wasn't just that she'd been under a car at all after Stevie had urged her and the two women to favor trunks (among which Merle had been futilely searching until he'd had no choice but to hide himself). It wasn't just that Carol hadn't immediately and unhesitatingly chased after her own kid or attempted to distract the walkers by drawing them toward herself (like Merle hadn't hesitated to sprint after Sophia the second he'd realized that she'd prematurely broken from cover and gotten into a bad situation).
It was Carol's excuses that threatened to send Stevie into unprecedented rage, again.
"I didn't mean to let Sophia get so far ahead! I-I didn't! I was just… distracted… A-And then Rick said to get under the cars!"
"Lori pushed me under before I could get to Sophia! I would've run to her, but I couldn't!"
"Lori held me back when the walkers started chasing Sophia! My baby! Two walkers are after my baby!"
Straight-up negligence. Blind adherence to any available authority figure. Utter lack of accountability. Weakness. Cowardice. Victimhood. It all rankled. And Stevie bit her cheek nearly raw to keep herself from screaming, If Lori was holding you back, then you should've broken her nose to get free! She would've done far worse if you'd tried to keep her from saving her own kid! For fuck's sake, I can't stand the uppity bitch, but at least her maternal instinct rates slightly above turnip!
But Stevie was done trying to reason with the quivering blob of Jello that Carol had become. Stevie was done talking sense and being sneered at as an unruly adolescent just because Carol would rather sob than admit fault or accept responsibility.
Stevie was done.
"Hey," Daryl grunted, coming to stand near the teen as she continued to pace along the guardrail, well away from the rest of the campers. A cigarette dangled from his lips but remained unlit. And the hunter had positioned himself upwind of her, too, certainly recalling her aversion to the smell of smoke. "Merle won't let nothin happen to yer sister," he insisted, squinted gaze slowly sweeping the tree line. His skill at comforting could use some work, but the fact that he was trying spoke volumes.
Sparing him a slight, shaky smile, Stevie agreed, "Sure ain't Rick I trust to bring her back."
Daryl huffed out what passed for a laugh from him. "My brother taught me most a' what I know 'bout bein in the woods," he muttered, shoulders already crawling up toward his ears with the effort of sharing personal information. "And whatever ya said ta him at the quarry… He's been a lot better since. More like the old Merle rather than ol' Merle." They shared a brief chuckle at the lame joke before he added, "Got Jenner ta give him detox meds at the CDC. Gave me all his hard shit ta hold. Seems real serious 'bout stayin sharp out here."
Her resulting smile was much more genuine than the first, and she stated, "I'm glad… And if I couldn't be the one with Sophia, I'm grateful it's him." She didn't mention her (perhaps unfair) fantasies about killing the man but was able to make herself stand still, though every muscle in her body felt tight to the point of pain. Arms folded together in a mockery of the hug she wanted and wouldn't get, Stevie leaned her weight into Bruno's bulk and sighed.
There was no more conversation, just growing dread as the sun dipped lower and lower with no sign of movement from the forest. At some point, the slim watch hidden beneath the stack of friendship bracelets on Stevie's left wrist vibrated softly, and she dug out and threw back the appropriate meds, guzzling half a bottle of water with them and offering the other half to the other half of her silent vigil.
Daryl shook his head, looking a little surprised. Well, if he hadn't noticed her alarm going off every twelve hours, then it was doing exactly what she wanted it to. She missed the watch she'd had before the dead started walking; that one had been completely obnoxious, much more her style but obviously not suited to the changed circumstances.
And then Rick appeared.
Alone.
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Why did I make Jim commit suicide by walker herd? Two reasons.
(1) I thought it would be fun to give him a chaotic, violent, and gory end to juxtapose his "Goodnight, sweet prince" canon death, which I've always thought was really stupid. Can we all preemptively agree that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, deliberately leaving people to turn and thus become future hazards to ourselves and others is not allowed? Cool? Cool.
(2) We're closing in on the Greene farm arc, and I already have too many characters to juggle; the last thing I need to add to that is the annoyance of having a Jim and a Jimmy at the same time.
(I totally thought of those reasons after the fact. Originally, I had all the extra characters (Jim, Jacqui, Jenner, Amy, and Merle) scattering and getting lost in the woods along with Sophia, but I changed my mind. If you can guess why, you get internet opals.)
Anyway, I think my posting schedule is officially dead, at least for now. I'll try to get it restarted at some point, but this year has already been shitty and unpredictable. So, no promises. Review, please :)
*IDK what was wrong with the original Chapter 16. It (seemingly randomly) went back and forth between being fine and giving error messages. I thought maybe it would sort itself out eventually, but that didn't appear to happen. So, I just deleted it and reuploaded. Hopefully, it's fixed now. Please let me know if there are still problems. I apologize to anyone who had already reviewed; I have no idea if those will be preserved, but regardless, I appreciate your kind words.