my tears ricochet

Chapter Forty Eight

Joe's pack of wild men combed over the train tracks with a restless ambition, seeking out vague outlines of another person's passage. More maps appeared along the way and he memorized their shapes and lines, the messages written overtop like salvation in blood. Daryl kept feeling the switchblade in his pocket as he counted the nights and days that had grown between him and his last memory of his daughter, edging along the others as they hunted.

He was torn between lingering with their numbers or pushing ahead. If Ivy was one of their targets, he needed to clear her from the threat looming behind her shadow. But the closer she got to Terminus meant that she was closer to a refuge and he needed to find her, somewhere, and figure out how to fix the damage he created.

Occasionally Daryl could find traces of Ivy in the landscape of the wild. The steel toed boots he had found her ages ago made her steps heavier, and along a bush of berries he saw where footprints dug a little deeper into the soft soil. They were a contrast to the softer, lighter set that ran beside them. Sometimes they would find walker bodies left along the railway line and he instinctively knew where to follow the lead into the trees, that delicate shift in direction to find better cover before resuming their march.

He assumed someone was with her. He hoped that she wasn't alone. His passage from the prison had left him a haunted man, brittle from the weight of his loneliness. Joe's league of men made sense. Their mutual fire fed the others, strengthening their chances as they ravaged the pieces left behind.

Len bent to examine an emptied can of kidney beans and whistled. "Still wet," he announced to Joe. "See that?"

The tin can was a trophy in his grip. He shook it, splattering the ground with droplets. Joe frowned as he surveyed it. He had spent most of the morning settling the amnesty between Len and Tony over which direction they wanted to push after. Clear tracks had veered off from the rail line that Tony had wanted to alter direction for but Len was still hungering after whatever woman had caught his attention.

Daryl had pieced together the two stories with a hunter's patience and he lacked sympathy for the men. Tony was stalking after a man who murdered one of the group and slipped away before they even knew the damage, joining at least two other people. Their trail vanished intermittently around the tracks and maps, clearly making a point to stick to the coverage of the nearby country roads and trees.

And, as Len described it, he and another man had watched two women stop on the side of the road before the split up. They had gone to offer charitable help and were attacked, Len battered unconscious while the other man was butchered.

He didn't have much faith in Len's charitable streak.

So Daryl hunted and followed, picking out the signs as he went, tucking a small flame of hope tight against his chest so he could feel real again.

Ivy left her knife for a reason. She wanted him to know where she was going if their paths managed to intertwine for a second time. The fact managed to ease some of the shrapnel inside his heart, making it easier to keep his feet moving, to keep living and breathing and pushing further along the path.

It was worse at night trying to sleep. He dreamt constantly, plagued by moments of losing his daughter again and again. The worst ones were the ones that began easy; stepping away to settle a bill at a diner and looking back to an empty booth, driving in circles to pick her up from school and finding the streets on fire and walkers staggering out, opening a closet door and finding nothing inside. Sometimes Daryl would find her body and other times he couldn't.

He kept drifting onwards, focused on the pink knife like a compass. When he looked out at the trees and wild space, Daryl thought he could see Ivy in it. Or maybe he couldn't and it was just Daryl tugging along his delusions across the distance, convinced that he was going in the right direction.