my tears ricochet

Chapter Ninety Four

Desperation made Ivy light headed as she fought to lift herself off of the damp sand. Her own blood blinded her briefly as she tried blinking it away, ears ringing from the chaos of enduring.

She was stuck to the ground like a butterfly pinned in a display box. She couldn't brush away the hands that were touching her, unable to prevent someone from dabbing at the blood on her face. All she could see was a bright white sky overhead, felt the water brushing over her heels and ankles.

Ivy didn't know where she was and she was vaguely startled to find out that she had survived. Her brain ached as she forced her memory backwards to try and separate the flashes of pitch black water dragging her under and the scene on the bridge.

"— Where am I?" Ivy rasped, tilting her head slightly back to see a woman peering down at her. "Am I dead yet?"

The woman's face looked frozen. Her mouth didn't move as she washed away the blood from across Ivy's forehead.

She hit the water and broke against the current... headlights vanished as it snatched her away... her body slammed against rocks and debris caught in the water... someone had died and now she was dying in slow motion... lungs burned like hot irons, skin scraped raw from the force of the fall... her grave was somewhere waiting for her—

Beth's gun was gone. Ivy's hand twitched towards her pocket but it was empty. Whatever she had was abandoned to the bridge and the water itself. "They keep trying to kill me," Ivy forced the words out. "They take everything— how do I make them stop?"

The woman blurred and three more hovered in close proximity. Ivy's eyes struggled to separate the shapes and piece together the background of a wrecked beach.

A bullet grazed her... her hand desperate to haul herself over the wooden railing... paint chipping beneath her fingernails like flimsy splinters... take the exit, Ivy, take the exit... -don't you want to see your dad one last time?

"I'm coming back for him," Ivy ground out, aggravated by their relentless silence and hands that refused to stop touching her. Someone held tight to her wrist and pinned it against the sand. "Simon. He's going to die. And then Negan. Every single one of them. They're dead, they're dying, I'm going to be there—"

Bright pain laced along her skull and she shrieked in response to it, twisting to escape the touching. Her entire body felt frozen like the river was stuck inside her veins, that the frigid black waters churned straight through her lungs and heart.

Water lapped at her feet noiselessly.

"— her up."

Someone shoved her upright and managed to hoist her upright. Ivy leaned uselessly against a shoulder, her rubbery legs refusing to manage to process of standing. "Am I dead yet?" Ivy gritted out through her teeth as she struggled.

"Should be—."

Ivy saw a waterlogged walker roll over in a bloody puddle a few feet from where she was. A girl with black hair jammed a spear through it, rendering it dead properly. It's bloated body collapsed into the sand and she was envious of it, envious of that painless relief.

They dragged her along a passage of bleached trees swept into the shore. Their branches looked like bones stretching up into the sky, exhausted from the process of being forced ashore by a current and tide. Her feet left tracks in the sand and Ivy hoped Daryl would find them, that he could sort out her passage because she was helplessly lost.

Her map probably hadn't survived the river. Ivy had left a few personal possessions in the garden shed where she buried her axe, most notably being Oscar's old sudoku book she had finished and Rick's flask. All she had were the clothes on her back and the inability to just die peacefully.