56 Aftermath

Running that's all we've been doing. We were deep into the woods trying to find a safe place to rest. Although, the herds of walkers that streamed in towards the prison left us with few places to turn. If we set up a camp for any longer than an hour, we would be faced with another group of walkers stumbling upon us. All we could do is follow the others, the rabbits and deer, and I even spotted a wild dog pack shooting through the woods, away from the scuffling feet of danger. We trust their sense of direction because their instincts are sharper than ours. But they are much faster, flying through the underbrush so gracefully as my boots catch on roots and fallen tree limbs, that there is no way we can keep apace with them.

The heat is horrible but worse than the heat is my quench for water. My lips cracked and the air threatened to suffocate me at any moment. And I continue to run, choking, my face cut with branches that materialize from my daze without warning, because I know I am supposed to run. I hurdle over a log. Not high enough. The tail end of Daryl's biker vest gets caught on a branch and I have to stop to rip it off. Once I regain my footing walkers have closed in from the front as well. I raise my gun as the one-armed man reaches out for me. My Glock is empty. Daryl appears from the side, shooting the walker in the skull from point-blank range. The walker drops and he retrieves his arrow before pushing me along.

In a matter of minutes, my throat and nose are burning. The coughing begins soon after as we enter into an open field. The grass is long and stands tall, giving us some coverage the further we sprint. Discomfort quickly turns into distress until each breath sends a searing pain through my chest. We reach an open patch when I fall to my knees and flip over onto my back. Daryl flopped down beside me, heaving in chunks of air. I know we need to keep moving, but I'm trembling and light-headed now, gasping for air.

My vision focuses on the clouds above me, the puffy condensation finally covering the sun from my eyes. You get one minute, I tell myself. One minute to rest until the sun peeks back out from behind that cloud. I take the time I have to regain my breath. I glance over at Daryl to see he's unable to lay still, his arm thrown over his sticky forehead to block the sun. Before my minute is up the familiar sound of tantalizing gurgles becomes prominent. They were in close range again. And just like that, we were on the run once more.

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Night had fallen upon us quickly and we had finally had a couple of hours to ourselves. Enough time had passed since we lost the scent of the walkers and hadn't stumbled upon anymore. We took this as an opportunity to set up camp and get some rest. Although, rest seemed like the last thing my body was capable of doing. I desperately needed to shut my eyes, but my mind refused to shut off.

Daryl managed to get a small fire going from dried-out twigs and leaves. We still had no food and more worryingly no water. As the night wears on after a day spent running, my head is aching with each heartbeat, and there's a dry spot on my tongue that refuses to moisten. What keeps me from being able to shut my eyes is the paralyzing thought of our group divided. I have no relief to the unknowing. Who is dead and who is alive. And sitting here wasting away precious time that could be spent looking for them was eating me alive.

"We should do something," I said softly. This was the first time I uttered any words since we retreated from the prison. Likewise from Daryl. His eyes stayed trained on the sparks rising from the flames between us. "We should do something," I now said a little louder and more demanding. His eyes finally trailed up to meet mine. He sat against a log, his arms perched up on top of his knees. Daryl has always been careful with his words, but this was different. This was a defeated silence. "We aren't the only survivors. We can't be. Rick, Michonne, they can be out here. I saw Maggie and Glenn heading towards the bus." He looked away from me, his eyes focusing back on the ground. "They could've."

There was a silence between us again. I was growing angry with him now. He was giving up. Just as I was about to speak up again Daryl finally spoke. "How do you expect us to even find them," he said under his breath.

"We're trackers. You, better than I. We can track them," I said, shakily rising to my feet. "Come on. The sun will be up soon. If we head out now, we can--" I then realized he was barely listening to me. "Fine. If you won't track, I will." I picked up the knife from off the ground and walked off.

As much as my body ached, my head pounded, and my lungs burned, I was determined to find our people. I refused to settle with the unknown, I was going to figure out who was alive one way or another. To my relief I could hear Daryl get up from his spot against the log, the sound of his footsteps scuffling on the ground behind me.

The sun rises in the sky fairly quickly and even through the canopy of the trees, it seems overly bright. I try to think about everything I know about tracking. Looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything out of place. If I could just locate a footprint or an area in the leaves that looks too scuffed up from just an animal, these might help me along. But I know that Daryl's expertise would go a lot further.

From the corner of my eye, I finally see Daryl bend over to brush a coating of leaves from the forest floor. He's only a couple of meters away from where I had been walking so I quickly scurry over. He blows away the last remaining leaves to reveal two footsteps on the smaller side. They are too neatly pressed into the ground to be from a walker's dragging feet.

"Could be Luke's. Or Molly's," I suggest. "Whoever they are, it means they're alive," I say, considering the shoe prints couldn't be from a walker.

"No. This means they were alive four or five hours ago," Daryl responded.

I pursed my lips to his response, "They're alive," I said harshly before continuing on following the trail.

I followed the footsteps closely through the trees until they led us out onto a narrow sandy trail. The tracks in the loose dirt were easier to see now, indicating to me that there are at least three different footprints. Two children and an adult. I round a bend, Daryl following close behind me.

"They picked up the pace right here. Got out in a hurry," Daryl called out. I turned around to see him pointing at something I missed. His index finger directed me to a bundle of berries just to the left of the trail. Some squashed underneath a shoe from being dropped from their hands and then stepped on in a hurry. "Things went bad."

"Wouldn't kill you to have a little faith," I snapped back, walking away from him.

"Yeah, faith. Faith ain't done shit for us. Sure as hell did nothin' for Maggie and Beth who just watched their father get decapitated and can't do nothin' about it."

I spun around abruptly to look at him, to let him know that was out of pocket. He glanced back at me and the expression on his face already told me that he regretted saying it. I was trying hard to keep myself together right now, it felt like any little thing could set me off. Daryl wasn't the most optimistic person to be around, but I could always count on him to fight until the very last moment. And the fact that right now he was acting as we had lost, that our people were dead, was tearing me to pieces.

I turned away from him, holding back the tears that were threatening to spill out. I sucked in a deep breath and began to pick berries off of the tree beside me. "They'll be hungry when we find them," I said, choosing to ignore what I knew he thought we'd find.

Just then I felt a light tap on my shoulder. I turned my head to see Daryl offering up his bandana to me. A peace offering. I took the fabric from him, placing the berries in my palm and wrapping them up.

"Come on." He nodded his head and continued off down the trail.

We followed in the footsteps for about ten minutes before I could see that more were appearing. Softer footmarks that dragged across the forest floor. We finally reached two dead walkers sprawled out in the middle of the trail, a male and a female. I look down at them, analyzing the bodies. They both had a knife wound in the back of their skulls.

"What is it?" I asked Daryl as I spot him grabbing onto the branch of a tree where its leaves had been coated in blood.

"That ain't walker blood," he responded, sighing.

"So they fought back. The trail keeps going," I offered up the obvious answer because I refused to believe otherwise. I walked past the dead walkers a little further down the path.

"You know better than that. We got walker tracks all up and down here. At least a dozen of them."

A twig snapping quite harshly from beyond the trees caught my attention. I immediately pulled out my knife and turned back towards Daryl to warn him. Within seconds I could feel the cold, clammy hands of a walker grab onto my shoulders. It was closer than I had realized. I shrieked out as the walker yanked on me and I tried to squirm out of its grasp. Although, my body was weak and I was unable to pull myself from it. Daryl ran up on me, his crossbow raised and trying to find the shot, but my body shielded the walker's head from him. Daryl reluctantly dropped his crossbow and gripped onto the walker's shirt, yanking it off of me.

The walker toppled on top of him as they scuffled around on the ground. As I reached to retrieve my knife from the leaves, Daryl managed to pin the walker down on its stomach, his body weight holding it down. He looked back at me, a nod of approval coming from him as he signalled he was ready to flip the walker for me to kill.

Right on cue when I nodded back, Daryl rolled over, the momentum bringing the walker back on top of Daryl. I lunged forward and sunk the blade of my knife into the walker's forehead. Warm blood dripped from the wound and seeped down either side of its head. Daryl threw the body off of him before any of it could transfer onto him.

He rose to his feet, huffing out a relieving breath, "Come on."

I swallowed hard, knowing how close of a call that was. It was a wake-up call really. Until now we've just been running, fearful of allowing one to get too close to us. Now this proves our instincts were right, at the moment we are too weak to put ourselves in these situations.

I followed Daryl as he walked out in the opening of the trees, his height descending as he jogged downslope. I followed the same path, exiting out onto a train track. I stopped walking when I heard the feasting gurgles. My eyes landed on the massacre of the people I had forced us to track. As I predicted, two children and their mother laid on the outskirts of the track. Walker's faces inch deep into their bellies as they ripped them apart.

I could feel Daryl fuming from beside me. He raised his crossbow, taking out each walker from where we stood. This was my breaking point. I slowly walked up to the scene before me, my shoulders sinking into themselves as I fell to my knees. The tears rushed out of me as I stared at a stray boot that had slipped off one of the little boy's feet. The reality of everything that had happened finally kicked in. No one was alive. We are all alone. It's time to start over.