Future Ghosts • TWD

18. Scars.

When they heard the bells, the group went sprinting off into the direction the sound was coming from. They found themselves in a clearing. There were graves scattered in the lawn of a church. But the church had no steeple.

"That can't be it. Got no steeple. No bells," Shane said. Rick kept walking anyway. Even if there was no chance that either of the girls were there, he wasn't just not going to check. He started sprinting towards the church, the rest of the group following behind him.

Rick and Daryl were in the front, but they both halted to a stop at the sight of a tall male walker lying dead on the pavement just in front of the stairs. Its head was bashed in. They kept going, stopping in front of the closed doors as they readied their weapons.

When they pushed the door open, they found two more walkers. One was a woman, lying on the ground right in front of the door. The other was a man, lying in the isle beside one of the pews.

But neither Rosie or Sophia were there.

"They're not here," Shane said to Rick, who still looked adamant on searching the place. "It's a waste of time. Anyone could've killed these walkers-"

He was interrupted by a quiet cough from inside the church.

Daryl was the first to move, quickly making his way over to where the cough sounded like it had come from. He went to the pew with the dead walker. On the floor of the church, in between two pews, a blonde girl laid unconscious and shivering. Her bare back was facing him and her arms were wrapped around her stomach.

He stared at her bare back for a moment. Her skin was deathly pale, aside from the red marks scattered around her back. Daryl's stomach churned at the sight of them. Those marks were familiar to him. He knew she'd have them, but that didn't make him feel any better about it.

He crouched down, eyes scanning her arms for bites. In one hand, she held onto a hunting knife which was covered in blood, and in the other hand, she held tightly onto the necklace she always wore.

Rick showed up behind him, also staring at the girl's back. Lori and Shane had told him David was an asshole, but he didn't know to what extent.

Daryl looked back towards Rick. "Gimme yer shirt," he said quickly. Rick nodded and quickly unbuttoned the sheriff's uniform. He handed it over to Daryl, leaving himself with only the white t-shirt he wore underneath.

When he lifted her body up to slip the shirt onto her, his eyes latched onto her collarbones. He'd expected to see the scars left on her back from her father, but what he didn't expect to see were the small, circular scars that littered her collarbones. Some of them were faded and white while some were still a light pink color.

Cigarette burns.

Daryl thought back to when Rosie would stare at the cigarettes Merle and David would smoke, flinching each time one of them made any sudden movement.

He pushed the thoughts of David out of his head and focused on Rosie again. He pulled the short sleeves over her arms and wrapped the shirt tightly around her, not bothering to take the time to button the buttons.

"Rosie," Daryl said quietly. She didn't respond. "Rosie," he said again, lightly shaking her to try and wake her up without scaring her. She still didn't wake up.

Daryl raised his hand from her shoulder to her head, gently brushing her hair out of her eyes so he could see her face. "Hey, Rose," he said again. "Come on, girl, wake up."

The girl's eyes fluttered open and her breathing began to quicken. She scrambled up into a sitting position, but quickly regretted it as her vision began to blur again. "Hey, Rose, easy. It's me," he said, his hand on the back of her head, "It's ok. Yer fine."