my tears ricochet

Chapter Eighty Three

"Hold up," Eugene said as he fumbled with unfolding the map. "This'll be a straight shot if we follow the tracks."

"No," Daryl and Abraham said at the same time, frowning. Abraham shook his head and added, "Road way looks clean."

"That's twice as far."

Rosita bit back a smile as she looked over the fallen tree. "Now you know how to read a map? Where was that three months ago when you were leading us in circles?"

"I never got my badge in navigation," Eugene said primly. "But I'm telling you if you want to conserve time and energy, we should follow the line down."

"We ain't following no tracks," Daryl scoffed as he kicked a branch. "Go your way if you wanna go it alone."

He jumped around the steeper bank where the tree had fallen from. The ragged looking stump had a softness to it as a sign of rot and the base jutted up from the ground at an angle.

"Hell, you just know she wants to start crying," Abraham pointed upwards at the overcast sky. "Can feel it in my knees."

"What, you telling me that you're old now?" Rosita playfully elbowed him as she came around his side.

The man grinned. "Positively decrepit. My ass is lucky you can't send me to Shady Pines to live out my days."

"Could always shoot you and turn you into glue," Eugene edged into the conversation uncomfortably, the boundaries still unclear between men. Portions of the friendship had carefully and slowly been revived but Abraham still looked at the man like a stranger he couldn't fully trust. "Alexandria could always use a little something extra to hold itself together."

Daryl kicked a stone across the cracked pavement and watched it bounce out of it. A few plastic water bottles littered the side where the grass ran high and thick, barely visible beneath layers of dirt and dust. He heard Abraham's quick bite of a laugh from behind as he took the lead.

"Please. We'd turn him into duct tape," Rosita said. "You remember how half that engine on that old rig was held together with tape and chewing gum?"

The distant buildings ahead were easier to look at instead of remembering the marks on Ivy's wrists from the tape.

Her faltering expression when Daryl had to almost haul her through the clinic's doors.

The way she tried to hide her limp, pretending that her leg wasn't a mass of bruises from hip to knee because a grown man decided to kick her while she was down and on the floor.

It was a relief when a walker ambled out onto the road, lured by the sound of playful bickering. The body looked almost androgynous with decay; flaking grey skin and bleached hair, one eye partially gouged out. Slim fingers jerked towards Daryl as he approached on a light foot, neatly ducking the reach before swinging a machete straight through the brittle skull.

It hit the ground in a crumpled heap, part of the head sliding down with an audibly wet noise. He stepped over the body and kept going.

Daryl suddenly understood why Merle had always been craving a fight, had lusted for the moment to challenge and brawl. The world was easier to process if he could just swing his fist and earn back something. He wanted to drink and smoke and fight; purge the anger straight out of his system with the chaos of something else.

Ivy's black eye and bruised face made it almost easier to picture her as a child.

A loud drone of thunder earned Abraham's whistle as they listened. "How much further?"

"See those smoke stacks? That's the place to be."

A factory loomed across the paved yard and Daryl noticed the picnic tables shoved around a side entrance , wood marked with cigarette burns, a rust bucket of a truck parked nearby. They crossed the space carefully and scanned the perimeter for any signs of movement. Rosita skirted around a decaying body left to rot in the shadow of the building and looked up at the structure. "This is very blue collar of you, Eugene."