my tears ricochet

Chapter Forty Two

"Walkers in D!" Glenn shouted as he started sprinting for it. Daryl was after him and he realized belatedly that Ivy was on his heels, keeping pace as he swung his crossbow from his back and into his arms. The morning light slid away into the shadows and he launched himself into the chaos, Rick taking point at the door. People were screaming and it was hard to tell who was infected and who was simply panicking.

The smell of blood hung thick in the air.

A child stumbled backwards from a walker and Daryl grabbed him by the waist, hefting him up into the air. He was turning and trying to get his crossbow levelled with one hand but Ivy fired first, clearing the space between them with practised aim. She fired a second shot and he lunged to hand off the child to a woman in a cell who was ready to swing the door shut at anything coming.

Gunshots echoed and he jumped to focus on movement. Ivy had both hands on the gun and held it towards the ground carefully. Half the room had vanished and their tight group met in the centre.

"Are we clear down here?" Rick demanded, scanning the room with a frantic expression. It was the first time Daryl had seen him hold a gun in his hand since the day of the prison attack. "We're safe?"

"Yeah, yeah," Sasha yelped, wiping blood from her boot.

Someone above shouted and Daryl took the stairs, reloading his bow with a new bolt. A woman was slumped on the ground at the top of the walkway and he stepped around her, meeting Glenn at the upper level of cells.

Settling into the prison long term meant domesticating the space. They suddenly had a surplus of supplies and someone had started hanging blankets from the doors to create the illusion of privacy. Now it was a risk, shuffling along the opening and hoping nothing would lunge out from within.

One of the walkers caught Glenn by surprise and Daryl managed to fire clean despite the struggle. The body nearly pulled Glenn to the ground by the weight of execution but he yanked free, picking himself up again with a nervous expression.

They would have to start locking doors again, he realized. The prison had descended into a play-pretend life where the kids left chalk drawings around bullets holes and the adults patched over brutality with gardens. Even Carlos' execution spot had turned into an outdoor gathering centre by Oscar's steady hand, erasing the violence with a fresh layer of paint.

Getting soft meant exposing weak sides. The world had enough teeth waiting to descend.

People had turned into bodies, left out across the floor. Someone would have to check that the surviving members of the cellblock weren't bitten, but Daryl saw how their group shrunk again. And a selfish part of Daryl noted how at least it wasn't their own people.

It wasn't Maggie or Carol, or anyone that really mattered to their hearts. It wasn't Ivy. He could live with this loss.

"That's all of them," he said, looking down at the room from above. Ivy had backed herself into a corner and kept a watch over the corpses and Sasha and Tyreese were standing by the doors.

They shifted into the miserable task of checking the bodies and finishing the violent work with a final knife or arrow. It felt like violating the bodies of the dead to continue the brutality but it was easier than letting another walker rise up and through the prison into a second round of chaos because of miserable sentimentality.

Rick paused at one cell and he could see the indecision flicker across his face before pulling out a knife and stepping through the curtain hanging. Daryl pretended to adjust the string of his crossbow and waited for him to reappear with a wet blade.

Carol's voice floated from one of the closed cells and he pretended that he couldn't hear the horrible sounds of a father dying, concern for his two daughters etched into his heart and mind. They kept moving along like executioners while the infection kept consuming the man below, taking every bit of life left in him like a fire burning.